CZM Rewind: Part One: Savitri Devi The Woman Who Turned Nazism into a Religion

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M what esoteric my hitler ISM's ship that is two
hitler starts in a row. Jesus Robert, Well it fits
with this episode. This is Behind the Bastards podcast about
the worst people in all of history. I'm Robert Evans.

(00:21):
I'm the host, and my guest today is Jamie.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hi.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
I just go Jamie one name.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Now.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
I'm the Beyonce of No Billy Wayne's, the Beyonce of
Behind the Bastards.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yeah, you are the podcaster formerly known as the Beyonce
of Behind the Bastards.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Yeah, they're the Beyonce of my heart. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah, there we go, Here we go. Oh Jamie, how
are you doing today?

Speaker 3 (00:48):
I'm good. I'm good.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
I I think that that's true.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
I'm good.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
I have to add I have to add it probably good.
I have to add a bag to my Spirit Airlines flight.
But that's about as as challenging as it's getting to day.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Speaking of monsters, that is the greatest monster of all
online interface.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, you had to like swipe your credit card if
you sneeze on a Spirit our Lines.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
I have this friend, his name is Lenny, and he
listens to the podcast, so he may hear this and
Lenny is one of the one of the most experienced
travelers I know, and at one point I was taking
a flight with him in Eastern Europe to Ukraine through
whizz Air, which is one of the worst airlines plane
I've heard of.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
Whizz Air.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
Yeah, they're terrible.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
Never had the pleasure.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
There was a moment where they started hassling us about
our bags and it became clear that we weren't going
to be able to like fit everything like that, we
were going to have to take stuff out. And the
line from him that I'll never forget was I guess, well,
I guess I'm wearing all my pants today.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
I've bore multiple pairs of pants on how if you're
not going onto his Spirit Airlines flight wearing five jackets?
Like what you you're you're grabbing yourself, You're I've been
on a Spirit Airlines red eye next to like an
actively drunk person multiple times.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Although that's just normal, I.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Know, but I think, yeah, you're right.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
If you haven't wept, if you haven't wept and thrown
things away while waiting to get in line at Spirit Airlines,
have you even flown? We've gotten off topic, very off topic, Jamie, Yes,
have you ever heard of Savitri dev No? Oh good,

(02:38):
oh boy, Jamie, you are in for a motherfucking treat. Ooh.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
I love when you don't tell me an advance.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
Okay, okay, Yeah, this is one I'm gonna guess almost
nobody listening to has heard of. But she's one of
the most important people for understanding where we are right
now in the year twenty twenty, Like the most the
most recent headline that ties directly to you. Remember when
the FBI arrested all those members of the base, that
that neo Nazi group, there's plenty to start a second

(03:05):
Civil War by randomly firing into a crowd in Virginia
that was full of armed people. Yeah, that whole, the
whole hulla balloo. Yes, yeah, Well she's kinda behind all that,
although she died decades before it happened. So that's today's story.

Speaker 3 (03:20):
Nice, let's do it.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
So now, Jamie, we're gonna start like we start every
good day by talking about our loll buddy. Shouldn't call
him a buddy, Adolf Hitler. Oh, it's weird because I
can call Stalin a buddy, but I feel like calling
Hitler a Buddy's a bridge too far.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
I don't know on this show, I feel like there
are just rules that are different.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
Yeah, they're they're old friends at this point. So, yeah,
Hitler was at he was a secular ruler, Jamie. He
was not a not a not a not a. I
think I think there's a lot of misconceptions about kind
of the nature of his power and like his regime
because of all of these like History Channel documentary, in
this industry of books on Nazi occult history and like

(04:03):
Nazi magic and the hell Boy movies like to hear it, Yeah, yeah,
I mean they're great movies, at least one of them is.
But like this idea that like the Nazis were like
full of full of magic, right, and that Hitler like
believed all sorts of like weird kooky occult stuff about
like raising the dead and aliens and shit, and it's

(04:25):
just not true. There were some funky occult ties to
national socialism, but they were phrase oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah,
cult ties, yeah baby yeah, But they weren't to Hitler.
They were to like kind of like side figures, like
the b List of the Nazis. A lot of those
guys were kind of into the occult, but like your

(04:46):
A listers really were pretty secular guys.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Beyonces the Nazi Beyonce is as I'm trying to think of, like.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Like the the Nazi Jeremy Renners.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
Oh, how dare you speak his name in this forum?

Speaker 3 (05:01):
I thought we made a pact to never speak of
him again.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
We never signed that contract. We never did.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
It was under negotiation for a long time.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
Yeah, it is still in arbitration now. The Toulliss Society
spelled Thule Society like the top racks on people's jeeps?
Was it? Well? Suberus people Suberus. The Tullas Society was
a German ocult group in the early twentieth century in Germany,
and it provided some of the early funding and leadership

(05:34):
for the Nazi Party. Heinrich Himmler held bizarre quasi magical
beliefs for his whole time in power, and he was
kind of into some weird He thought he was like
a reincarnated prince and some shit. Sure, but Hitler himself
was not at all into occult stuff. And the only
guy really close to him who was was Rudolph Hess,
who was his deputy and for a long time his
best friend. This is the guy he like co wrote

(05:55):
minekompf with like Hess and Hitler are like fucking type
before Hitler.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
His ghost his ghost writer.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
Yeah, kind of like more like his his muse. Yeah,
and also the guy who was a competent typist both.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
I mean, you got you gotta if your muse is
also a competent typist.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:17):
Who says the perfect person doesn't exist?

Speaker 1 (06:20):
Yeah, Rudolph has That's what people say about Rudolph Has
is he was the perfect person. So he was also
the deputy fearer for a while oh six. Yeah, he
was a cool dude, but he wasn't really in the
picture for very long. He got increasingly marginalized after Hitler
came to power in thirty three, and in nineteen forty

(06:41):
one he kind of went bug fuck and got on
a plane and flew to Great Britain while the two
countries were at war. Sorry sorry, sorry?

Speaker 3 (06:50):
How would you define bug fuck?

Speaker 1 (06:54):
I would define bug fluck is like independently hopping in
your private plane and flying to a country that your
country is actively bombing to try to parachute down and
negotiate for peace between your two nations without anyone asking
me to. I would describe that as pretty bug fuck. Yeah,
that's not This.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Is like a new term for me, and now this
is the only like reference point I have for it,
So I'm not gonna know how to how to define
bug fuck moving forward. Okay, So bug fuck is when
like the world is falling apart and you're like fuck
it and you go the fuck off and then you
is that.

Speaker 1 (07:34):
It kind of yeah, like it was the kind of
thing where like there was no chance of it ever working.
He did not have the authority to sign a peace
treaty for Germany, and Britain did not have any interest
in talking with him or making peace with Germany at
this point sick. So he basically just flew and crash
landed in England and got arrested and spent the rest

(07:56):
of his life in prison. Very much And it was
a huge embarrassment for Hitler because this this is like
his right hand man who in the middle of the
war like flies to his enemies country to like try
to negotiate without Hitler's approval. It was it was very weird.
And because Hess was like this occult dude into astrology
and all this shit and like this weird, he was

(08:17):
actually kind of like a Buddhist, like he's a weird dude.
But because he held all these weird beliefs and he
pissed off Hitler so badly, Hitler bans like all of
this weird occult shit that had cropped up around the
Nazi party in nineteen forty one. Okay, so yeah, so
after forty one, like really most of that stuff is illegal.
Heinrich Himler gets up to a little bit of it

(08:38):
with the SS because he's got a castle and he
he's just a weird dude. We'll get into some of
that in the later episode. The important thing to understand
is that, like, yeah, Hitler was like a distinctly not
wooy guy, Like he's not a new age sort of dude.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
He's like a dive.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
If you mentioned you're like if I He's like the
guys on Reddit who like, if you mentioned you so
much as mention your zodiac sign, they're like, she's not credible,
she's fine, she's a she's lost.

Speaker 3 (09:06):
Yes, I love that type of person.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
And I feel confident saying that one hundred percent of
Hitler's biographers agree he would have been extremely on Reddit.
I oh, more on Reddit than anyone has ever been
on red.

Speaker 3 (09:22):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah, no, he would be the most reddity guy of
all of them. And we have to admit that that
is very what's his sign? That's that's very his sign
of him.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
Wouldn't you say, I don't know, he's such.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
A Taurus He's sure?

Speaker 1 (09:43):
Sure, Okay, continue, that's I assume you're referring to the
maker of really shoddy handguns, uh, which is I think
they're Brazilian terrible guns.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
To Okay, Now, I'm just trying to on the behind
the bastards board.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
Now, either way, advocating the Taurus sign or the Taurus
firearms brand is not going to go well for you.

Speaker 3 (10:06):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
So yeah, so now Hitler, so he's not into the
occult at all. He's not a big fan of Christianity either.
He felt it was fundamentally Jewish because Jesus was Jewish,
which is, you know, not an irrational point of view
within the logic of being a Nazi, and he worried
weaken the German people. But he also respected Christianity for

(10:30):
its ability to inculcate good values in the German people,
and the primary good value it inculcated was making lots
of babies. Because most Germans were Catholic, and Catholics aren't
big fans of condoms. I'm not sure if you're aware
of that.

Speaker 3 (10:44):
Ummm no, I know. I wouldn't have MS if it
weren't for this.

Speaker 1 (10:49):
Attitude, none of us would. Now. Hitler himself was a
baptized Roman Catholic all his life. He probably didn't really
believe much of anything other than that that Hitler would
a cool dude, but he felt it was important to
maintain this image.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
Now.

Speaker 1 (11:04):
There were some among his followers thought it was Nazism's
destiny to become the new Great German religion, but Hitler
himself pushed back against this, insisting in mind kompt that
national socialism quote is not a religious reform, but a
political reorganization of the German people. He believed quote it
is criminal to try to destroy the accepted faith of
the people as long as there is nothing to replace it.

(11:25):
And it is possible that given enough time, Hitler would
have tried to replace Christianity with something else, but he
never attempted to do so. And as far as we know,
the supernatural as it's generally known, played very little role
in the Nazi regime. But and here's where the real
episode starts. In the decades since Hitler shot himself in
that bunker in nineteen forty five, Nazism has changed quite

(11:46):
a lot. The actual political and historic beliefs of the
original Nazis and of Hitler himself have been twisted and
shifted into something even weirder. It would be too much
to say that this new form of Nazism is more
dangerous than the original, given the tens of millions people
who died from the original Nazism, but it's probably accurate
to say that the fact that Nazism has mutated into

(12:07):
what we call esoteric Hitlerism has made it better able
to survive in the era of the Internet. Now, Esoteric
Hitlerism is a term used to refer to a number
of different strains of post war Nazi thought that put
a bizarre religious and occult spin on Nazi racial theories
and on Hitler himself, often seeing the man as essentially
the avatar of a god. Four Chan and eight Chan

(12:30):
are in the modern age, two of the most prolific
vectors for the spread of this brand of nonsense. Sure,
there are strains of it in Brenton Terrence Manifesto, and
in Anders Brevik's manifesto. And today we're talking about the
woman who invented all of this, the single person who
became the living link between the Nazism that tried and
failed to conquer Europe and the modern Nazi movement that

(12:50):
spawns mass shootings and attempted mass shootings on a monthly basis. Today.
Her name was Savitri Devi and she was a huge
piece of shit.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
This is someone's feminism somewhere. Yeah, this is some piece
of shit's feminism.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
She is a feminist icon.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
Feministic feminism is the law.

Speaker 2 (13:08):
Now.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
This is a woman who spent her whole life living
alone with a pile of cats and changing Nazism forever.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
Okay, well what if she just did the first half?
You know that she was not willing to do just
the first She was like, okay, so I'm in a
pile of cats. That's great, what else could I do?

Speaker 3 (13:28):
And that was her second idea. That's embarrassed, that was.

Speaker 1 (13:30):
Her second idea. As she does start first focused on
the cats and then moves straight to Nazism though, it's remarkable. Yeah.
So she was born Maximiani Portas on September thirtieth, nineteen
oh five in Lyon, France. Her mother, Julia, came from Cornwall,

(13:50):
the town with the thirty sixth dumbest name in all
of England. Her father's ancestry was a mi longe of
various Mediterranean peoples without access to birth control. He was
mostly at Italian in Greek. Although young Maximiani was born
a French citizen, she latched onto her father's Greek ancestry
from the very beginning. Some of this had to do
with the fact that Leon had a large and active

(14:11):
Greek expat community, and her dad was a prominent member
of it. She also nursed an early fascination with Roman history.
Her name Maximiani was actually just the female form of Maximian,
the proper first name of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. So's
a she's a big old nerd. I really have to
emphasize what a nerd she is.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
I feel like I've met versions of this girl in
like sophomore English classes and they're like, actually something something,
and you're like stop at stop at plea is just
like finish reading.

Speaker 3 (14:41):
Their eyes were watching God, Let's move on.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
I was the male version of this for a while.
I mean, I took three years of Latin because I
was such a Roman history nerd.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
Okay, Robert, some of us took five years of Latin.
And do we remember a fucking thing?

Speaker 1 (14:55):
Of course, no, no, not a goddamn word.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
Like when I was in high school, like in junior high.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
In high school, if you were like in the quote
unquote advanced classes, they would be like, let's teach them
a language they can't use so stupid, god.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
Damn totally useless term. Did you have to use me?

Speaker 2 (15:11):
That's one of those did you have to use that
textbook that was about the the Romani family?

Speaker 3 (15:16):
Did you do Eka Romani?

Speaker 1 (15:18):
Oh no, no, man, I was like fucking Kills and Quintus.
I remember those names. They were like the fucking there.
It was like a bunch of Pompeii people who all
die at the end of the book. Everyone died at
the end of our textbook.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
Was it like we we have the We had the
Cornelia family. It was like Cornelia and her brother Marcus,
and then they had a friend named Sextus.

Speaker 1 (15:43):
Who knows, they sound like fucking losers, they weren't they?

Speaker 2 (15:47):
For me, there, your your family sounds way better because
our family there was like three books in total, and
the whole second book, So like all of eighth and
ninth grade, they're just stuck in a ditch. They're like
in a ditch. Their characters in a ditch. They can't
get out. They're staying at an inn. The innkeeper's yelling
at them. They're stuck in a dick. They're stuck in
a ditch for a whole month, and then they go

(16:08):
to Rome and and everything is fine.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
It sounds like a nightmare. Second well, yeah, nightmare, so horrible.
Maximiani would have gotten a lot. Well, no, she wouldn't have.
She would have been the most annoying person in our
Latin class. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:23):
I don't like when people are in the Latin class
and they're also like into it. I'm like, we should learn.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
You didn't have to learn to pronounce anything, right, You
never had to speak because there was a dead.

Speaker 3 (16:36):
Reason to speak it.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
Well, no one knows either, like you've got ecclesiastical Latin,
but there's no way to know if it was exactly
the same as what the Romans spoke. So we just
didn't give a shit. It was great.

Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah, Teacher ms Cook would come and she would what
was the thing she would say, she was like, okay,
dysipuarly at this dy skipuli. Like she'd be like, hello, students,
let's learn Jewela Caesar, and then we would just talk
about how the family was stuck in the ditch all day.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
All day horrible.

Speaker 3 (17:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:07):
Well, Maximiani spent her young life stuck in that ditch,
and that ditch was called being a huge nerd for
Mediterranean classical civilizations. She was a strong willed child, which
here is a synonym for unspeakably arrogant and a giant
pain in the ass. She felt strongly about just about everything,

(17:28):
children and everything. Yeah. Strong willed.

Speaker 3 (17:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
She was known to be utterly immovable once she'd latched
onto an idea. One strong opinion she developed early was
that British people were terrible, which is not inaccurate. She
hated her mother's English friends and the way they prattled
on about illnesses and their dying families.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
Harsh.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
God, that's so harsh.

Speaker 3 (17:50):
I wish my family wasn't dying, and she's like.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
Shut up, Jesus Christ, Yeah, we get it. She didn't
like French people very much much either, and the particular
cause for her hatred of the French was the French Revolution.
She read about it as a little girl in school
and was instantly furious. The Republican ideals of equality, liberty,
and fraternity disgusted her. She was punished at school for

(18:13):
making an obscene gesture at a plaque of the Declaration
of the Rights of Man. And again, she's like eight
or nine. Yeah, she's like a fucking little kid at
this point.

Speaker 3 (18:23):
That is that is so funny.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:27):
The Declaration of the Rights of Man, which small child
Savitri Devi flipped off, includes such controversial takes as people
are innocent until proven guilty, people have the right to liberty, property, security,
and resistance to oppression. And people should be able to
speak and write with freedom. Wow.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
Some real hot sh run out there. Yeah, geez, Okay,
so she was like born.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
To be harmful, she was born to be a fascist.
As a small child, she's like, people aren't equal? What
is this bullshit?

Speaker 2 (19:01):
That's so the little flipping off to human rights? You
do you do feel like we should have known, we
should have known.

Speaker 1 (19:09):
I mean, I love flipping off old documents too, But
to me, it's the Magna carta and the Magna Carta
knows why.

Speaker 3 (19:16):
The Magna Carta knows what she did.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Oh yeah, the Magna Carta shakes in her boots whenever
you come walk.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
The Magna Carta is a messy bitch, and I have
no time for it.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
That okay, Robert, I can't believe you just called a
female document a.

Speaker 1 (19:32):
Bitch a messy.

Speaker 3 (19:34):
You're setting a bad example, Robert.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
Feminism is document misogyny.

Speaker 3 (19:40):
She's she's literally shaking right now. She's here.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
Oh no, she's in the room with you. You didn't
tell me the Magna Carta was in the room today.

Speaker 3 (19:49):
She's literally she drove me here.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
Horrible.

Speaker 3 (19:53):
She's, well, I don't want a driver's license. I don't
know what you want.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
I don't know how much further to take this bit, Jamie,
So I'm just gonna Later in life, in nineteen seventy eight,
Savitri Devi told an interviewer a beautiful girl is not
equal to an ugly girl. So she remained pretty consistent
about her belief in the fundamental inequality of human beings
like her whole life.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
And she's getting really granular about it too.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah, yeah, okay, she's granular about fucking everything. Her chief
motivating factor in her childhood, I have to say was
completely understandable. She felt a deep, powerful sense of rage
at the abuse of animals by human beings. Okay, starting
at age five. Yeah, starting at age five, she began
expressing to her parents concern at the abuse of animals

(20:37):
she witnessed in a daily basis. She was horrified by circuses,
the fur trade, and the eating of meat. While still
in elementary school, she became a committed vegetarian and eventually
a vegan. Maximiani Portos was particularly disgusted by the abuse
of cats by peasants on the French countryside. Her only
real biographer, Nicholas Gudrich Clark, claims this quote disgusted her

(20:58):
and turned her against mannedkind. And since most people listening
probably don't know anything about the history of cat torture
in Europe, I didn't know anything about the history of
cat torture in Europe. I'm gonna have to talk about
that now for a little while, Jamie.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
Like specific to this region, cat torture.

Speaker 1 (21:14):
All of Europe, really, but like, yeah, specifically to France.
Like the French fucking hate cats. Okay, they are assholes
about cats. Yeah, Today we rightly revere cats as our
moral and intellectual superiors, and we've organized our society around
pleasing them. This is right and good, But cats have
not always been beloved in the West. Well, they are

(21:36):
considered basically holy in Islam. They're like ritually clean, Like
you can have them in mosques and stuff all over
the place. You have to wash your hands after touching
them if you're gonna go pray. There's a long Christian
tradition of seeing cats as demonic entities, and to be fair,
Islam is kind of shitty on the subject of dogs.
So I guess whatever of the big religions you pick,
you're gonna be terrible to one of the good animals.

(21:59):
I don't know why. Yeah, it's weird now. In the
fifteenth century, Edward, Duke of York, announced that if the
devil inhabited any living animal, it was the cat, and
for centuries all around Europe, good Christians tortured and murdered
cats for almost no reason. In Yepra, Belgium, they held
an event called Cat and Stoate the Festival of Cats,

(22:19):
which sounds awesome but actually just involved drunken townsfolk throwing
cats from the top of the church on the hard
cobblestones and then lighting them on fire.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah, yep, I hate Okay, it's always really frustrating when
you hear a story about the underclass and it's like
you're playing to stereotypes about the underclass.

Speaker 1 (22:37):
Yeah on the pavement, Yeah yeah, I mean I'm gonna
be honest. I bet the rich people got to go
up first and throw the nicest.

Speaker 3 (22:46):
Cats just to set a good yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
And then and then they would privately be throwing cats
at hard marble floors as well.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
Yeah, my god, it's horrible. And cat and stoat still
takes place in Yupra every May, but they use stuffed
animals now, which just stop, just just stop. It's not
a good tradition.

Speaker 3 (23:05):
It would be so easy to not do it. It
would be so easy. Do they do Do they eat
the cat?

Speaker 2 (23:11):
Like? Do they?

Speaker 3 (23:12):
Or is it just we're just killing the cats?

Speaker 1 (23:14):
Not that that makes a no, No, they're just murdering
cats for no good reason. Okay, it's fun. That is
worse and people are horrible, But Jamie, you know who
doesn't randomly torture cats in Belgium? Your sponsors exactly right
now that Sophie vets every sponsor to make sure they
do not torture cats in Belgium.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
Yes, is that that's true? That's is a lie, Robert.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
Okay, okay, it is a small country, so the vetting's
pretty easy. Like you'll notice, I did not say, for example, Canada. No,
you certainly did. No, I did not.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
Canada just got canceled before our very eyes product.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
We're back.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:08):
Those were good ads, good Jamie, good products. After all
those good ads, are you ready to hear more about
the systematic torture of cats by generations of Europeans.

Speaker 3 (24:18):
I just got a cat, Robert, This is not fair.

Speaker 1 (24:21):
I love cats. Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (24:23):
Shout out, Flee, shout out to flee my cat.

Speaker 1 (24:26):
He's got a big neck.

Speaker 3 (24:29):
He's got a big neck.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
Free shout out to Roach, one of the side characters
in uh the first version of the movie with Keanu Reeves,
where some of the people are bank robbers but they
also surfers. Oh oh oh, oh, oh oh.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
You're talking about the Keanu Reeves surfing movie with with Yes,
we've covered it on specle cast.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
Yes. Roach. Roach is the one who bleeds out in
a plane point break. He's a good character.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
We're talking we're talking about point break.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
Yes, point break, that's the movie a classic. Yes. Now,
in France there was a centuries old tradition of burning
hundreds of cats to death and gigantic bonfires. Louis the
sixteenth even famously lit Paris's catfire in sixteen forty eight.

Speaker 3 (25:15):
Uh, the king is such a catfire?

Speaker 1 (25:19):
Yeah, of course, who else, Jamie, who else?

Speaker 3 (25:23):
This is just all news to me.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
Just I just yes, so news to me too. I Okay, I'm.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Glad that this wasn't like common knowledge. I would be
horrified if I just didn't. You know, it've been burning cats, Okay, I.

Speaker 1 (25:35):
Like it doesn't surprise like obviously, like you have to
assume earlier times people are more callous to cats and
dogs because them being like what they are now is
kind of a more recent development because we have all
these extra resources. But I didn't realize it was this
like cruel.

Speaker 3 (25:52):
This is a lot. Yeah, king is sitting the catfire.
That's like bad writing.

Speaker 1 (25:58):
Yeah, so the king would Yeah. So brulais lechats, which
I am not going to pronounce more correctly than that,
because it's a horrible thing. And fuck fuck France, as
it was called varied in a number of different ways.
Sometimes it was just massive bonfires where living cats were
tied together in like huge pires. Sometimes living cats were

(26:19):
tied above small fires on like a spit and then
roasted to death. Sometimes cats were set in wooden cages
and burnt to death. In some towns, people known as
quremauds cat chasers would soak cats and fuel light them
on fire and chase them through town to the amusement
of citizens.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
Peoples are so upset all the time.

Speaker 2 (26:37):
I know, right, damn they're an oppressed species.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Yes they are.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
Yeah, I would be pissed.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
We you should be. I'm pissed, I am. The charred
remains of these tortured cats were taken home as good
luck charms by people. In seventeen thirty, as revolutionary sentiment
simmered and bubbled throughout French society, two Parisian apprentice printers
got fed up with the masters and abducted their cats.
They staged a massive public trial, the Great Cat Massacre,
as it's become known to history. Now, this was tied

(27:08):
more towards issues of class hatred than hatred of cats.
But the cats wound up actually like.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
Escape cats for the whole situation exactly, and that's also
the worst way to die as as a symbol for
something that has nothing to do with you.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah, those cats have no understanding of class theory.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
It's took at someone and then they're like, well, this
has something to do with Like my opinion on the
new Taylor Swift record has nothing to do with Jamie.

Speaker 3 (27:37):
But I killed her as to send a message.

Speaker 1 (27:40):
It would be like if one group of aliens came
to Earth and murdered you for something they knew human
beings were going to do one hundred years in the future,
something you're completely incapable of understanding or knowing about. Yeah,
like just yeah, this, like it's just wild. But these
apprentices felt their masters treated the family cats better than
their workers, and because they couldn't quite you know, murder

(28:03):
their bosses, they got a crowd together and they captured
a bunch of rich people's cats, and then they put
them on trial and sentenced them to be hung until dead.
And they hung just a fuckload of cats to death.
That is, they made like the owners of the cat's watch.
It was super fucked up.

Speaker 3 (28:18):
I don't know what to do right now.

Speaker 1 (28:23):
Well, Eva, what you can do right now is you
can get a little bit into the head of a
sensitive young soul like Maximiani Portas, because a lot of
this stuff was still going on in France. It wasn't
at its worst, but like cat torture and burning was
still happening in the countryside. And she sees this as
a little girl and is like, this is part of
why she hates those like, you know, French revolutionary and

(28:45):
I'll use a freedom and equality is She's like, well,
clearly this is all bullshit. Look at what they're doing
to these animals, Like where's their you know, equality and
freedom and like like she that's kind of like where
she comes at this from, right, Yeah. Yeah, So she's
deep sympathetic to animals and particularly cats, and basically incapable
of being sympathetic to human beings. And yeah, an interesting story.

Speaker 2 (29:11):
I'm going to be interested in how she galaxy brains
being sympathetic towards the plight of brutally murdered cats to
becoming a fascist.

Speaker 1 (29:21):
But you know fascist common thing for fascists to be
honestism well, you know, not committing cat murders, but like
hating people because of how garbage they are, and thinking
fascism is the only way to fix it, because people

(29:41):
just can't be allowed to live on their own.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
Okay, I need to I thought you were saying cat
specific reasons. I'm like, well, this is a true education.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah. Now, Maximiani was very good in school. She was
a bright student. She read and wrote constantly, and her
very favorite writer was a nineteenth century French poet named
Charles Leconte Delile. And here's how Savitri's biographer describes Lacante
Delile's work in the book Hitler's Priestess, which is really
the only decent biography of Savitri. Devi quote le Comte

(30:12):
Delile's own tragic view of the universe. His romantic colors
were always tinged with somber pessimism, strongly appealed to Maximiane.
He regarded all religious symbols as fragments of a divine truth,
but the profusion of faiths over time convinced him of
the relative value and ultimate vanity of every doctrine. Beset
by a sense of cosmic futility, Lecante Delile rejected Christianity
and evoked the stoical heroism of barbarian and exotic peoples.

(30:34):
In his famous poem Psycho poems Barbaras. He was also
powerfully attracted to Hinduism following the translation of its sacred
texts in the eighteen forties. Maximiani felt a profound sympathy
with La Comte Delile's view of life's fragility, the vanity
of existence, and the illusion of the world. His romantic
poems about the ancient Egyptians, the Scandinavians, the Celts and Hindus,
their proud paganism and heroic action yet final resignation in

(30:57):
the face of death and oblivion confirmed her own version
to Christianity and helped her form her own fatalistic worldview.
So Goths didn't exist in the early twentieth century, but
Maximiani's clearly that.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
She is a proto goth It's again, it's just like,
if there had been a hot topic for her to,
you know, be a lot, a lot could have been avoided.
Imagine how many hot topic employees were saved by that.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
Business, Yeah, a lot of them. Imagine how many fascists
we avoided by, for example, the existence of Kylo Rin
fan fiction there.

Speaker 3 (31:35):
Honestly, honestly, it's wow, that actually hit for me.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
Wow, that hit that people. People need an outlet, you know,
and if you don't, this is what happens.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
Right, You're just like, if you can make it horny
and palatable, you're going to.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
Prevent something bad. This was a a young girl who
desperately needed to be distracted, and nothing distracted her. And that, right,
it was a problem.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
Laye out a pretty clear track for you to really,
I mean, I just, yeah, send me back in time
with a Jack Skellington hoodie for this woman.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
Oh my god, that would have solved so many problems.
I want to create some others.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
I mean, she still would have been a deeply annoying person,
but like I had a Jack Skellington hoodie.

Speaker 3 (32:19):
But also I had never seen the movie. I was
a total poser.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
Oh boy, that's going to get you canceled harder than
anything else today.

Speaker 3 (32:26):
And then I saw the movie and guess what, I
didn't like it very much.

Speaker 1 (32:30):
I watched it.

Speaker 3 (32:31):
It's fine, it's fine, Well, actually I don't. I think
it's maybe not so good. Beautiful animation though anyways.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you get to judge it for
its time, do I. Anyways, it was no For example,
the Little Toaster, I don't know aprils, Yeah, yeah, it's up. No, no,
it didn't fuck kids up.

Speaker 3 (32:58):
I loved the pray.

Speaker 1 (32:59):
Little Toaster damaged me forever.

Speaker 3 (33:01):
Really, that's why he But he was so brave, Robert,
he was so brave.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
Movie fucked me.

Speaker 3 (33:08):
That's why you throw bagels, right, Robert, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
It's why I'm scared of fucking radiators.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
You've got to do some exposure therapy for you with
a brave little toaster. That's why he doesn't toast his bagels.
He only throws them. That's embarrassing. I mean, that's like
the thing. Tragic, tragic. Imagine the path we could have avoided.

Speaker 1 (33:32):
I know. Maximiani Portis was very political as a young girl.
When World War One started in nineteen fourteen, she at
nine years old, knew very clearly that she did not
trust the Entente powers, so like England, France, you know, Russia.
Some of this likely came from the fact that Greece's
King Constantine was very pro German and refused to get

(33:54):
into the war on the side of either the entent
or the Central Powers. But the King of Greece's Prime minister,
a guy named Venizelos, which I'm probably mispronouncing disagreed with
the king. He was very pro British and supported Greece
getting into the war. The two fought over this for
years until in nineteen sixteen a group of pro Venizelos

(34:15):
army officers staged a coup against the king. There were
rumors that the Untaunted back this, and those rumors seemed
credible in light of the fact that French and British
troops landed in Salonica and Athens in nineteen fifteen and
sixteen to force Greek compliance in their demands from military
access to the Macedonian Front so they could better fight
Austria Hungary. That's a lot a history there, but basically,

(34:36):
she's very pro Greece and wants Grecee to stay out
of the war because she also likes Germany, hates the English,
hates the French, and she's pissed off because England and
France back this prime minister who wants Greece to get
into the war, and they also fuck with Greek sovereignty
and stuff. She gets really angry over all.

Speaker 3 (34:53):
And how old is she at this point?

Speaker 1 (34:57):
Where are we nine, ten eleven years old? The end
in nineteen sixteen, when.

Speaker 3 (35:01):
They imagine, did you know what was going on in
the world when you were nine or ten years old? Like,
how aware were you?

Speaker 1 (35:07):
I was pretty I mean nine eleven happened when I
was like twelve, and that was definitely like the start
of me getting political. I guess, yeah, I was in
World War One. Yeah, you know. World War One's that
level of thing, right where like even a little kid
is kind of like, you're going to pay attention to
that shit. It's kind of a big deal.

Speaker 3 (35:24):
You don't have a fully formed opinion, but you'll know
what's going on.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
You'll know what's going I guess.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
I'm just like, it would be so bizarre to me
if someone was like Jamie's beliefs at eight years old,
was nine to eleven?

Speaker 3 (35:35):
Was school got out early that day?

Speaker 1 (35:37):
And this is where I should note that this is
going to be an imperfect episode in terms of that
sort of thing, because our main source on this is
Hitler's Priestess, which is a biography that's fairly decent but
also flawed because it's mainly based on Savitri Devi's own
biographical writings of her recollections of her own life. Like
there's just not a lot of information there's not a

(35:58):
lot of weren't a lot of people to go back
to and like talk to about her and as a
child and stuff who were still alive when she became relevant. Oh,
if I think it was written in ninety.

Speaker 2 (36:07):
Eight, if I could write about like what I thought
I thought at eight years old, I'd be like, Jamie
was a brilliant genius who had opinions on foreign policy.

Speaker 1 (36:17):
Okay, got it well. But that said, given the I
don't think we shouldn't discard all of this because if
you look at the thrust of her life, she does
live the life of someone who's always been very political.
I mean, she's sure, yeah, exactly, that's a vibe. So yeah,
Venizelos and his men took over part of Greece with

(36:38):
the backing of Britain and France, and those two countries
were happy to recognize his government.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Well.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
They carried out a brutal ten month blockade of the
Greek provinces that stayed loyal to the king, and young
Maximiani watched all this as she grew into an adolescent girl.
Some of her earliest memories were news reports of protests
from Athens of Whyalist crowds railing against the entent and
Maximiani sided with them and can say the Aton's treatment
of Greece to be basically criminal. Her disgust was reinforced

(37:04):
after the war. In the wake of the Central powers defeat,
the Ottoman Empire was broken up and Greece was given
control in the Versailles Treaty of a city called Smyrna
now Smyrna is a city on the Aegean coast of Anatolia,
which is modern day Turkey. It was the center of
a nearly three thousand year old Greek community that lived
on the coasts of Anatolia. Greece, with some justification, thought

(37:26):
that a lot of Anatolia ought to be part of
Greece because it was culturally and historically Greece and the
newly created nation of Turkey did not agree. So, with
the backing of the Versailles Treaty, Greece invaded Smyrna in
nineteen nineteen to make good on the promises that had
been made to them by the Entente, and the fighting
was a disaster from the beginning. The Ottoman Empire had

(37:47):
been defeated in the war technically, but on the ground
and actual battles. Their soldiers had performed pretty well. They'd
fought off a big invasion at Gallipoli. The birth of
the Turkish nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire
was met with a swelling of nationalist fervor and Anatolia,
and this helped to spawn a powerful insurgent Turkish movement
dedicated to defeating the Greek invasion. So a truce was

(38:08):
reached in nineteen twenty, but like many recent truces in
Turkish military history, it was not a real truce, and
around the same time King Constantine was restored to the
Greek throne. This turn the remaining great powers of Europe
against Greece, and even though they promised Greece Smyrna and
the Versailles Treaty in nineteen twenty one, they basically like
were like fuck that shit and their support.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
Do we know where the Greeks at this time stood
on cats?

Speaker 1 (38:34):
Uh, you know, they're closer to the Middle East. So
I'm gonna guess more pro cat.

Speaker 3 (38:39):
More pro cat, Okay, Okay, So okay, yeah, I think that.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
Yeah, the further in that direction, you get more pro cat,
less pro dog. You know, I think that's generally fair
so western. They've got a lot of dogs, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:56):
The dog.

Speaker 1 (38:58):
Maybe they just lit cats and on fire. I don't know.
I did not do that research.

Speaker 3 (39:04):
Okay, these are the questions I have Robert, take em
or leave them.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
So the French and Italian governments like betray Greece first,
and they sign agreements with the Turkish leader Mustafa Camal
and to ignore the promises they'd made in the Verse
I Treaty to Greece. Britain held out the longest, but
when Greece launched an offensive in Anatolia and March of
nineteen twenty one, all of the allies suddenly adopted a
policy of neutrality. Britain banned for their arm sales to Greece, well,

(39:31):
France was happy to allow its weapons makers to sell
straight to Turkey. The whole effort to incorporate the Greek
regions of Anatolia into the Greek nation ended in disaster
and military defeat. In nineteen twenty two, Greek forces fled
Asia Minor, and the Turkish army conducted a campaign of
extermination and ethnic cleansing on their Aegean coast. They massacred
some thirty thousand Christians, a mix of Greeks, Armenians and

(39:53):
Franks in order to ensure no Greek independence movement would
ever crop up on their coast. Again. Awesome, the Smyrna debacle. Yeah,
this is why there's no real Greek community in Anatota anymore,
not like there was for three thousand years prior. This
is like what wipes out that community. Okay, yeah, so
you can see why a Greek nationalist like Maximiani Portas,

(40:14):
who is like fifteen sixteen years old then and like
really actually starting to like understand the world, is furious
about all this, and it breeds in her a powerful
hatred of the Entente powers, particularly of France and of England.
And she basically felt that like all these fancy words
they had about liberty and democracy were bullshit when they

(40:37):
couldn't even hold the basic promises and protect the lives
of tens of thousands of innocent Greek civilians, which is
a fair point, very valid. Yes, yeah, yeah, Now I'm
not trying to like ignore the Turkish point of view
in this too, like Greece is not in the right
here as a country either, like everybody's in the wrong.
Although Turkey massacres thirty thousand people. So I'm gonna say,
maybe they're more in the wrong. But this is complicated. Yeah,

(40:59):
but this this is sort of how Maximiani is very
much on the side of Greece is fucked over. And
this is an entirely like a crime committed by the
Entente powers against Greece. Simply it sets up the rest
of her life in a lot of ways. Okay, So
other influences on her developing mind were the sight of

(41:19):
French crowds and Lyon cheering uproariously at the brutal terms
of the Treaty of Versailles when they were announced. She
was horrified when the French government stationed black Synegalese troops
to occupy the Rure, Germany's industrial heartland. Now, this is
one of those moves by France that engendered a whole
shitload of racism in Central Europe. It was a big
influence on a lot of early Nazi thinkers too. And

(41:40):
obviously black soldiers aren't he worse than white ones. But
as civilians living under military occupation, you're going to hate
whatever foreign soldiers occupy your country. And if those soldiers
are the only black people we've ever met, it wasn't
a great move on France's behalf Jesus Christ. Yeah, so
I'm trying to set up all of like this is

(42:00):
like the shit that like is forming. She's twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,
is all this is going on like formative fucking years.

Speaker 3 (42:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:07):
Yeah. So she hates France, she hates England, she hates
black people, she hates Turkish people. She's she loves a
lot more hate. She loves cats. This is the consistence one. Yeah, yeah, Jesus.
In nineteen twenty three, a freshly graduated Maximiani Portos left
France to attend college in Greece. She was just on

(42:29):
the edge of eighteen and furious with the status quo
in Europe, without any real clear idea of how she
thought things ought to be. Instead, she did, however, know
that she was obsessed with Hellenism, which is like ancient
Greek culture.

Speaker 3 (42:41):
She's a dork.

Speaker 1 (42:43):
Yeah, she's a big fucking joy.

Speaker 3 (42:45):
She's like wait, Helen of Troy Abstin.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
Oh my god. She would not shut up about the elliot.

Speaker 3 (42:53):
She was a fucking you know, I've read multiple translations
and you're like, can you not? OK?

Speaker 1 (42:59):
She has strong and profoundly thirsty opinions on Achilles.

Speaker 3 (43:05):
She's like ranked gods and goddesses hot to that.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
If she'd seen the actual movie Troy that came out
like a decade ago, she would have been furious, because
there's no way Brad Pitt was as hot as the
Achilles in her mind.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
Beautiful.

Speaker 1 (43:20):
Yeah, she believed the old Greeks had been quote a
civilization of iron, rooted in truth, a civilization with all
the virtues of the ancient world, none of its weaknesses,
and all the technical achievements of the modern age, with
that modern hypocrisy, pettiness, and moral squalor. Now this is,
of course, wildly inaccurate. The ancient Greeks were like, unbelievably

(43:41):
fucked up. They also did a lot of cool shit, obviously,
like every other ancient bee. That's all ancient people do,
a lot of cool shit. All Aztec's amazing shit, horribly
fucked up, ancient Romans amazing shit, Han Chinese ancient amazing shit,
horribly for everybody. Yeah, in the Greek specific case, they
fucked a bunch of little kids. They repeatedly put narcissistic

(44:02):
idiots in charge of their city states. They made numerous
blunders that ensured their period of military and economic might
was short lived, and they also created some of the
most influential philosophy in fiction and art that has ever
been made in the history of the human race. Complicated people,
Maximiani does not get a complex picture of ancient Greece.
It's just the good shit. Yeah, yeah, good lord, you

(44:26):
might say, like, I don't know, I want to say,
her understanding of Greek history was not deep. It was
certainly incomplete. That said pretty much only like, the only
thing Europeans would write about the ancient Greeks in that
period was wildly positive. You weren't going to get like
critical like commentary on, for example, Pederasti and ancient Greece
in fucking nineteen twenty, Like, you're just not going to

(44:49):
read that. Yeah, So, her love of Greece was mostly
focused on obsessing over their incredible art and fantasizing about
the idealized culture that she eve it existed.

Speaker 3 (45:00):
There, right.

Speaker 2 (45:01):
I mean this, I mean we as children all read
revisionist history about horrifying cultures.

Speaker 1 (45:07):
I was obsessed with ancient Rome for a lot of
the same reasons.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
Of course, because you were just like, oh, it seems
like they only to dope stuff and more cool outfits.

Speaker 1 (45:15):
Well, I will say I was kind of a fucked
up kid, so when I learned about like all of
the fucking crucifixions and shit, I was kind of like, hell, yeah,
you're so metal. I mean it is pretty fucking metal.

Speaker 3 (45:28):
You're so fucking metal.

Speaker 1 (45:30):
We'll talk about what they did to Spartacus and his
friends one of these days, but it's fucking one of
like the biggest mic drop moments in the history of
torturing people to death with wood. I think that's fair
to say.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
Thrilled to have such a hyper specific.

Speaker 1 (45:48):
So she moves to Greece. She's super happy for a while.
Obviously best place in the world for this girl is
fucking Grece at this point in time, and the time
she spent discovering the wonders of Athens, which rules coincided
with some very important goings on in Germany. And I'm
going to quote again from the book Hitler's Priestess. Well
years later she would recall that she spent such a

(46:10):
sunlit afternoon upon the Acropolis on ninth October nineteen twenty three,
the fateful day of Hitler's push when he and his
followers had attempted a coup against the Bavarian government and
staged a march to the Feldehernhall in the center of Munich.
The police successfully broke up the march, and sixteen martyrs
of the early Nazi movement fell beneath the hail of bullets.
When details of the incident were published in the world

(46:30):
press the following day, there was some discussion over lunch
at the International Home Hostel, which is where she was
crashing at the time. Maximiani admits that she did not
yet connect Hitler with her own dream of a new
racial order based on her view of classical Greek antiquity. However,
she strongly sympathized with him as an enemy of the
Allies on account of his contempt for the Versailles Treaty,
and saw a parallel between his nationalist idea of one

(46:52):
state for all Germans and the Megali idea among the Greeks,
which is the idea that Greece should recoup its ancient
power and takeo for the places that had controlled back
in the day. Argument Yeah, she engaged in a heated
argument in defensive Hitler with the French managers of the hostel,
So arguing about Hitler with a hostel, No, we lost her,

(47:15):
she's been gone for a while. Yeah, but you know
who won't argue in support of Hitler with the French
hostel owner in Athens, Robert the products and services support
this podcasts.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
And services would never ever heard us or do something wrong.
I've been saying it for years.

Speaker 1 (47:33):
I have agreed for years.

Speaker 3 (47:35):
Fingers crossed for a dig pill ad right after a Yeah,
what a great transition, both of you. Just wonderful work.

Speaker 1 (47:49):
We're back. So it was during this first visit to
Greece that Maximiani Portos would have seen the symbol for
the first time that would come to define her life
and legacy. I am talking, of course, about the swastika.
Odds are good she would have encountered it for the
first time in the National Museum of Athens, which hosted
a huge amount of what were believed to be Trojan artifacts,

(48:10):
which had been uncovered by the pioneering and controversial archaeologist
Heinrich Schleimann. Now, Schleimann was not a professional archaeologist, which
is not weird for the time. Most of like the
archaeologists of this period are like gentlemen adventurers who I
mean get our nerds.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Basically the people in the people in like the Mummy
movies who are just wearing chakeys exact money, and people
in Tarzan.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
That was the most accurate thing about the Mummy movie
other than the way mummies react to shotguns.

Speaker 3 (48:39):
They're all named Clayton. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
Yeah, so Shleimann Yeah. Throughout the mid eighteen hundreds had
been a very successful German arms merchant, trading raw materials
for the ingredients to make ammunition, and he'd nursed a
deep obsession with the iliat his entire life. In his
late middle age, he decided to take his fortune to
the Aegean and try to uncover the true locate of
the ancient city of Troy. Unlike pretty much any like

(49:04):
traditional archaeologist, Shlemann used the Iliad as a guide. He
thought this book was like basically essentially accurate, and he
followed the poem as if it had been a work
of serious historical scholarship, and shockingly enough, this kind of worked.
In eighteen seventy one, after three years of searching, Shlemann
found what was very likely to have been the site
of ancient Troy. His methods of digging it up were brutal.

(49:26):
He used crowbars and battering rams and destroyed countless thousands
of artifacts, including ironically, what a lot of archaeologists now
believe was the actual physical evidence of Troy. He dug
too far down, basically because he fucked up and probably
destroyed what actual Trojan relics there were. But he does
find what a lot of people think was the site

(49:46):
of Troy. It's just other shit was built there, and
he dug up the wrong shit anyway, fucked up, Yes, yes,
So his research or his digging, despite all the shit
it destroyed, produced hundreds upon hundreds upon hun of artifacts
which people at the time believed to be Trojan and
many of those artifacts, more than eighteen hundred of them,

(50:07):
were emblazoned with various types of swastika. And I'm going
to quote next from Scientific American. He would go on
to see the swastika everywhere from Tibet to Paraguay to
the Gold Coast of Africa, and as Schleiman's exploits grew
more famous and archaeological discoveries became a way of creating
a narrative of national identity, the swastika grew more prominent.
It exploded in popularity as a symbol of good fortune,

(50:30):
appearing on Coca Cola products, boy Scouts and Girls club materials,
and even American military uniforms. The Antiquities on Earths by
doctor Schleiman at Troy Acquire for us a double interest,
wrote British linguist Archibald Sais in eighteen ninety six. They
carry us back to the later stone ages of the
Aryan race.

Speaker 2 (50:48):
Oh dear on Coca Cola products, Robert, what if that
was just a product or serviced advertised?

Speaker 1 (50:58):
But it wasn't a naz It's like I I spent
some time living in Indias and it's fucking their's swastikas
all over the dam and it is weird. It takes
you never really get used to it because of like
what it means to the West. It's always like there's
so many swastikas around here.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
That is I mean, even that is fascinating to like
track the history of a symbol and like how it
affects different areas of the world differently.

Speaker 3 (51:20):
That sounds extremely jarring.

Speaker 1 (51:22):
I actually I have some like tapestries that I picked
up in India that have little swastikas on them in parts,
and it's one of those things where it's like every
now and then, like they're not the same as the
Nazi swastikas, but they're close enough that people will be like,
what's up.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
No, I need to leave your home right now?

Speaker 1 (51:40):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're like most people.

Speaker 3 (51:43):
Swasticas are pretty small. Most people aren'tetting enough the.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
Blanket Nazi Nazi swastikas.

Speaker 2 (51:49):
See if I was over your house and you said that,
I would be like, I actually, my uber is here,
you know, like if you're like, they're not nasty swas
Nazi swastikas, so calm down.

Speaker 1 (52:02):
Yeah, it's like that.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
Uh, and they offer me a Miller lt. They're not Nazis.
Would you like a Miller light?

Speaker 1 (52:11):
No, exactly, No, my standard greeting people.

Speaker 3 (52:15):
Yeah, that's how you greet all your guests.

Speaker 1 (52:18):
That's specifically how I say to hello to the officers
who pull me over for speeding.

Speaker 3 (52:23):
No, no, I would be interestedd I.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
I know I've gone down that Wikipedia hole at one
point of just like tracking the symbology, the symbology of
the it's it goes back.

Speaker 1 (52:34):
So Shleman. There's criticism of Sleman honestly for his methods.
But he's not in any way a Nazi, Like, he's
just a guy who finds a bunch of swastika is
buried underground, and he's just an.

Speaker 2 (52:43):
Unqualified archaeologist using his money in a weird way.

Speaker 1 (52:48):
He's he's very controversial. Still, there are aspects of what
he did that a lot of people praise because he
he got a lot of shit right, but he also
destroyed a huge amount of cultural antiquities. He's an interesting person.
You should read about Shlemans in archaeology. Okay, yeah, yeah,
I mean it.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
Seems like a lot of those gentlemen explorers really delighted
and you know, like destroying and selling off pieces of
ancient history that had nothing to do with them.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
All of them are problematic. Yeah, I will say Schleiman
is one who comes from like a purer place of
just being really into this history. But yeah, you know
they're all problematic, so hashtig problem. Yeah. Now, the swastikas

(53:36):
he found increasingly all over the world played directly into
a shared delusion that was spreading like a disease among
many of the eras white people. The myth of the
ancient Aryan. Now, in actual historical terms, Aryan is a
term used to refer to the Indo Aryan language group.
It was never a racial classification. The term started being
used because early linguists noticed strange similarities between languages like German, Romani, Punjabi, Hindu,

(54:02):
Urdu in Sanskrit. Well, the term Aryan was initially applied
to speakers of various Indo Iranian languages. The understanding of
the word became corrupted in the late eighteen hundreds. This
occurred along the same time that colonialism started to reach
its absolute zenith, and there were a lot of white
folks looking for reasons to justify the fact that they
were basically plundering and enslaving the entire world. There were

(54:23):
also a lot of white folks looking at their increasingly
multi racial societies, which at that point, like meant Italians
and Slavs breed with Germans and British people, and were
getting concerned about this fact. And I'm going to refer
back to Smithsonian Magazine again quote. The rising interest in
eugenics and rachel hygiene, however, led to some to corrupt
Aryan into a descriptor for an ancient master racial identity

(54:45):
with a clear through line to contemporary Germany. As The
Washington Post reported in a story about the rise of
Nazism several years before the start of World War two,
Arianism was an intellectual dispute between bewhiskered scholars as to
the existence of a pure and undefiled Aryan race at
one time stage of Earth's history. In the nineteenth century,
French aristocrat Arthur de Gobinho and others made the connection

(55:06):
between the mythical Aryans and the Germans, who are the
superior descendants of the early people, now destined to lead
the world to greater advancement by conquering their neighbors. The
findings of Schleiman's dig in Turkey then suddenly had a
deeper ideological meaning. For the nationalists. The purely Aryan symbol
Shleiman uncovered was no longer an archaeological mystery. It was
a stand in for their superiority. German nationalist groups like

(55:27):
the reich Schammerbund, a nineteen twelve anti Semitic group, and
the Bavarian Freikorp paramilitary basically the proud Boys of the era,
used the swastika to reflect their newly discovered identity. As
the master race. Now, the reality is that swastikas appeared
damn near everywhere in human history. It's a common design
and a striking one, and a bunch of different groups
of people have independently figured it out over time.

Speaker 2 (55:49):
And people should stop talking to you about your blanket
and actually just relax.

Speaker 3 (55:52):
They're pretty small.

Speaker 1 (55:55):
Nowadays. The swastika is the swastika, like it's the Nazi
thing unless you're in India, because the world's big. But
back in these days, like if you're looking at like
ancient history, it's best to kind of look at the
swastika the humor that weird s doodle we all put
on our trapper keepers back in the nineties, Like no
one invented that. It just showed up everywhere. That's the

(56:16):
fucking swastika in prehistory. It's just all over the damn place.
But of course, yeah, uh oh, I have that blanket.
It was not seen as this though by a lot
of people, and anthropologist Gwendoline Lake notes quote when Heinrich
Schlimann discovered swastikaike decorations on pottery, flagments and all archaeological

(56:38):
levels at Troy, it was seen as evidence for a
racial continuity and proof that the inhabitants of the site
had been Aryan all along. The link between the swastika
and Indo European origin, once forged, was impossible to discard.
It allowed the projection of nationalist feelings and associations onto
a universal symbol, which hint served as a distinguishing boundary
marker between non Aryan, or rather not German and German identity.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
That's fascinating that, I mean, because you can understand the logic,
but it also is kind of absurd to assume that, like, oh,
this symbol is always surely must mean the exact same
thing thousands of years ago as it does to me
today now.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
The people then were as dumb as the people who
planted the Iowa Caucuses. Wow, that's why all this happened.

Speaker 3 (57:26):
Robert, my dog worked on the Shadow app so really
wash your mouth.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
That is sunny.

Speaker 3 (57:35):
Sony invested in the Shadow app.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
I have to say it this all this math adds up.

Speaker 2 (57:41):
Yeah, I mean, of course he kept he was talking
about shadow app for and I'm like, that can't be real,
and then probably thought.

Speaker 1 (57:47):
It was the dog from uh uh, what was that
movie with the dogs and cat that talk and they
find their family terrible. I don't know a good movie
Homeward Bound, Homeward.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
Oh, I haven't seen Home found Sonny definitely just wanted
to harm people, and he wanted to harm the discourse,
and that's why he invested in shadow app That's fair.

Speaker 1 (58:08):
That's fair. You could call him the Hitler of the
Iowa caucases, which a lot of people.

Speaker 3 (58:15):
Many have, but it makes me uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 (58:19):
Sitting in Athens, reading the news of Hitler's movement in
Germany and staring at ancient swastikas on beloved Greek artifacts,
things started to come together in Maximiani Portos's mind. She
moved to Greece permanently in nineteen twenty eight, after finishing
college and renouncing her French citizenship. The very next year,
nineteen twenty nine, she went with her mother and aunt
on a trip to the Holy Land that wound up

(58:40):
having just as deep an impact on her developing mind
as the swastika. Now, Maximiani had never been very religious.
Her mother and aunt were, though, and while they failed
to inculcate a love of Christ in Maximiani, they did
succeed in making her hate Jewish people, which is not
the part of Christianity to transfer if you're gonna pick
one all.

Speaker 3 (59:00):
I mean, there's so.

Speaker 2 (59:01):
Many different horrible things to take away from Christianity, and
that is.

Speaker 3 (59:06):
That is the worst of all.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:08):
Yeah, she got none of the good stuff, just the
anti Semitism. Uh okay, yeah, yeah, it's not great.

Speaker 3 (59:17):
It's not great. I'm starting to think this lady maybe
not so nice.

Speaker 1 (59:22):
Not heading in a great direction. Yeah. Now, a lot
of this was tied to the fact that Maximiani was
so in love with Greek culture and she was really
pissed off because she was like particularly in love with
like ancient Greek pagan culture, like the old Greek gods
and their myths and stuff, and none of that stuff
was very relevant other than it's like an academic thing
by this point in history, and Christianity and Judaism were

(59:44):
obviously hugely relevant in Europe, and she hated this, and
she blamed the Jews for the fact that nobody other
people weren't as into Greek history as she was, Like
this is like the core of it for her. It
was like she's in love with like Zeus and shit,
and she's like, why don't people like this as much
I do. It's the Jews.

Speaker 3 (01:00:01):
She's become a chaos nerd.

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):
No, it's not great.

Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
Yeah, that's really bad.

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
So her trip to the Holy Land with her mom
and aunt was a bit of a weird one. No, okay,
I mean yeah. She was revolted by the obeisance they
played to Judeo Christian holy sites, and as she touristed
her way through old Jerusalem, she felt, in her biographer's words,
overwhelmed and repelled by the exotic nature of the Jews.
They're attired, they're customs, observances and festivals. The strange dark

(01:00:34):
men in broad brimmed hats and blong black coats hastening
to prayers at the Wailing Wall. Okay, it's interesting that
Goodwin Clark Portis's biographer mentions this specifically, seeing these Jewish
people and being like horrified by the way they look
in their coats and hair locks and long black coats.
It's possible that precise moment never happened, but it's worth

(01:00:57):
noting that this moment bears a striking resemblance to a
tale Adolf Hitler told regularly about the supposed moment that
he specifically gained his hatred of Jewish people. And here's
how he wrote about that moment in Mine comp. This
takes place in Lintz, No, sorry, in Austria, maybe his
boy Vienna. Once, as I was strolling through the inner city,

(01:01:18):
I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and
black hair locks. Is this a jew was my first thought,
for to be sure they had not looked like that
in Linz, where he grew up. I observed the man
furtively and cautiously. But the longer I stared at this
foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first
question assumed a new form. Is this a German? So

(01:01:38):
this is like a huge moment in like Hitler lore.
It's possible that the reason that Portis writes her own thing,
like her own story this way is that she's hearkening
to mine comp, because again she writes about this later.
It's also possible they just were similar people and had
a similar Momentpholks.

Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
If she's the primary resource for herself and seems to
have like a fair grasp on storytelling, it makes sense that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
She would pull It doesn't make sense she's like, oh,
this is.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
The end of act one, where's my inciting she needs
she wrote her own inciting incident.

Speaker 1 (01:02:11):
If it didn't, yeah, I'll take a leaf out of
you know. It's like, uh, you know, George Lucas stole
from from great Japanese cinema to make Star Wars, and
in a very similar fashion, Savitri DEVII stole from Adolf
Hitler the causawa of.

Speaker 3 (01:02:29):
Not tr true artists Steel Robert. It's what they it's
what they open saying for generations. Yeah, that is funny.

Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
I mean I feel like that same logic of like
you have to have a story to go with your hatred.
They have that same logic on like Iron Chef, you know,
like they be like, there has to be a story
that goes with this dish.

Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
And sometimes you're like, sometimes it just is.

Speaker 1 (01:02:54):
She just cooked some fucking food, asshole. Sometimes you just
make some food and it's bad and it's terrible.

Speaker 3 (01:03:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:03:00):
So Maximiani would go on to claim that after this
visit to the Holy Land, she decided that Hitler's campaign
of hate against Jewish people was not just a matter
of German concern, it was an international crusade. She came
to believe that all of the formerly pagan nations of
Europe had to throw off their Judaeo Christian heritage and

(01:03:21):
like reconnect with their pagan roots. And this is the
first time she realizes that she's a national socialist, and
she the way she described that, she realizes she's always
been a national socialist. And so she falls fully in
love with Hitler at this point. And she's not a
German Nazi though, And initially the way she decides to

(01:03:44):
act on this newfound Nazism is to basically try to
revive Greek nationalism and pagan beliefs, kind of with the
structure of national socialism over them. And so she returns
to Athens and she sets to work trying to cobble
together her own Greek version of Nazism, but focused around
a religious component that involved a return to worshiping the
ancient Greek pantheon.

Speaker 3 (01:04:05):
I mean always with this woman.

Speaker 1 (01:04:08):
Yeah. Now, by this point, the ancient Greeks had become
sort of the Uberminsch in her own mind, and this
conception was nursed by the bits of Hitler speeches that
made their way over into the press in her part
of the world. By nineteen thirty, she finally read mind
Camp for the very first time, which introduced Maximiani to
Hitler's theories about the Aryan race. His ideas about the
superior race consistently undermined by the evil Jews jailed remarkably

(01:04:32):
well with Maximiani's own beliefs about the ancient Greeks and
the Jews. She became increasingly obsessed with the Arians, and
in part the idea of seeking out the remaining evidence
of their existence. And at the time, it was generally
understood that India had been conquered and ruled by the Aryans.
Many among the weirder Nazi sets saw Hinduism as an
example of a pure Ariyan pagan tradition uncorrupted by Judaism.

(01:04:56):
They found the Hindu cast system deeply intriguing as well,
for reasons that should be obvious, and enshrining a small
number of superior beings and power over a vast number
of less valuable individuals. In nineteen thirty two, Maximiani's father
died and she decided to take this as an opportunity
to travel to India to seek out the truth of
the ancient Arians. It's like a Nazi version of Eat, Pray, Love.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
Yeah, this is in another world. This is a very
cute movie, and she just took every the same from it.
It's you remember that horrible Cameron Crow movie Elizabethtown or
Orlando Blue Drivers as the Country with.

Speaker 3 (01:05:32):
His Dad's ashes, and is like, I'm glad we had
this talk. And You're like, what the fuck are you?

Speaker 1 (01:05:37):
It sounds like forty different movies, Jamie, It's no, it's
the same.

Speaker 3 (01:05:41):
It's the same. Oh my elizabeth townheads Well, no, it's
the same. Paula Deane's in that movie.

Speaker 1 (01:05:49):
Cursed, Oh God, speaking of Nazis. Now. So Savitri decides
she's gonna go to fucking India, and she's not the
only person this idea of going to India to seek
out the Arians. In fact, in nineteen thirty five, Heinrich
Himmler's SS founded the annan Nerby, a scientific think tank
dedicated to finding evidence of the ancient Arians, and they

(01:06:10):
actually sent multiple expeditions into India and Tibet. Maximiani went
to India to find evidence of the Arians too, but
she also went there to see firsthand evidence of a
civilization founded upon what she believed was a natural racial hierarchy.
She felt that Indian society looked how the world would
appear in the year eight thousand, after six thousand years

(01:06:30):
of Nazi rule, very specifically then eight thousand.

Speaker 3 (01:06:34):
The Jonahs Brothers didn't even think that far, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:06:38):
But they're huge, The Nazi Jokers brothers are.

Speaker 3 (01:06:41):
Huge in the year never shut up enjoying this moment that.

Speaker 1 (01:06:45):
I do not get that joke.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
The Jonahs brothers first single in two thousand and six
or maybe seven was a song called year three thousand.
They said, not much has changed, but we live underwater.
That's all they knew about.

Speaker 1 (01:06:59):
That's a lot of change, Jamie.

Speaker 3 (01:07:01):
Well, they say.

Speaker 1 (01:07:03):
That not much has changed a thousand, not much has changed.

Speaker 3 (01:07:08):
I've been.

Speaker 1 (01:07:13):
Also live under water.

Speaker 3 (01:07:15):
It's a weird it makes no sense. Okay, sorry, Robert
continued your podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:07:20):
But she's thinking that a year eight thousand, eight thousand,
think even Kevin John she already has.

Speaker 1 (01:07:27):
You have to give her credit. She is eight times
as ambitious as Hitler.

Speaker 3 (01:07:33):
God.

Speaker 2 (01:07:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:36):
So upon her arrival in the country, her beliefs were
seemingly confirmed when she watched a parade celebrating Rama, a
deified Aryan hero. The parade featured huge numbers of dark
skinned Indians bowing and worshiping a lighter skinned statue of Rama,
and Rama is most assuredly not white, although he is
often depicted as lighter skinned, but he is definitely Indian.

(01:07:58):
But it was not uncommon for Europeans who were attracted
to India in this period to decide that a number
of ancient Hindu heroes and gods were in fact white.
This was like a common thing, and in fact, Maximiani's
favorite poet who we talked about earlier, Lecante Delisle, had
actually written a poem about Rama that referred to him
as Thou whose blood is pure, Thou whose body is white,

(01:08:19):
and a subduer of all the profane races. So, yeah,
everyone's a little bit of a Nazi in colonialism. That's
kind of the deal.

Speaker 3 (01:08:31):
That's kind of their thing. It's kind of I mean, yeah,
not shocking.

Speaker 1 (01:08:35):
And if you're interested in the story of Rama. One
thing I would recommend that's super accessible. There's a movie
online by Nina Paley, who's a female graphic artist who's amazing,
called Sida Sings the Blues. If you just google that,
it's the whole movie's free. It's one of those beautiful
pieces of animation. It's why I went to Indian in
the first places. An incredible movie.

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
Oh wow.

Speaker 1 (01:08:54):
And one of the things that does really well is
it has all these scenes where like individual like myths
from like Hindu mythology are explained by like groups of
people arguing about them, which if you actually go to India,
is how you learn about myths. Like if you talk
about the myth of Sida and Rama to like a family,
everyone in the family, you like get like multiple different

(01:09:15):
versions of the story, and people will argue with each other.
Like it's not like Christian orthodoxy or whatever. Like it's
very very complicated stuff, but fascinating. So yeah. Maximiani is
convinced that this guy's white, though, and she falls in
love with India and eventually finds her way to an
ashram in Bengal, where she's able to live cheap and

(01:09:37):
learn Hindu and study Hindu religious traditions. She gets a
job outside of Delhi teaching English and Indian history, and
she grew more and more taken with Hinduism, until in
nineteen thirty six, she adopted a Hindu name, Savitri Devi,
taken from a Hindu solar goddess. This woman is obsessed
with some gods and goddess.

Speaker 3 (01:09:56):
Loves gods and goddess is so much. She's such a dork.

Speaker 1 (01:10:00):
Yeah, it's specifically sun gods and goddess is. She's fucking
obsessed with Aknaton too. It's weird.

Speaker 2 (01:10:05):
There was a girl in my middle school who was like,
call me Artemis and we're like, no, okay, no, no,
we did, we did, and our and if. I was
also a dork, but not that kind of dork god, No, no, no,
I was just a normal, white, bright eyes loving dork.

Speaker 1 (01:10:22):
I'm a big believer in calling people by whatever name
they prefer to be referred to, unless it's the name
of a god or goddess. Then I just start I
just get furious. Yeah, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna
push that behavior.

Speaker 2 (01:10:36):
Well, she was. She was Artemis for all of eighth grade,
and then she went back to uh, just just Alex
for the rest of as far as I know her life.

Speaker 1 (01:10:44):
That's fine. Yeah, yeah, any other name really now. Early
on in her time in India, Savitri had hiked to
the top of a hill and seen a beautiful Indian fortress,
one of many such colossal ancient relics that dot the country.
She was taken by its beauty and equally horrified by
a more modern Jesuit hospital that had been constructed nearby.
This was powerfully symbolic to her, and she claimed that

(01:11:05):
it cemented in her a deep need to protect Hindu
India from being infected by Judeo Christian taint. Starting in
nineteen thirty seven, she began working as an anti Christian
preacher for Swami Satyananda's Hindu Mission in Calcutta. For two years,
she criss crossed the country, meeting with various tribal elders
and arranging public debates with Christian missionaries. And I'd like

(01:11:26):
to quote now from an article by Conrad Elst, an
indiologist who's analyzed this history. Quote. Thoroughly familiar with the
mentality and methods of her adversary, she could destroy the
credit of the imported religion in the minds of the
villagers and prevent or undo many conversions. There was a
sharp contradiction between her own racist and anti egalitarian convictions
and the reformist in a galitarian program of the Hindu Mission.

(01:11:47):
To the Hindu Mission, Hinduism was a value in itself
to Savitri Devi. It was but an instrument of her
imagined Aryan race. In her years as a preacher, she
kept her non Hindu preoccupations to herself, but in her
memoirs she declared that she conceived of her reconversion mission
as an exercise and deception from the racist Aryan viewpoint,
it was necessary to give the most backward and degenerate

(01:12:09):
aborigines a false Hindu consciousness, she wrote. This is one
of the major areas where you'll run into disputes about
Savitri Devi. The common view on her legacy is spoiler
that she proposed a synthesis between Hinduism and Nazism, and
aspects of this are true, but it would be more
accurate to say that she found Hinduism a useful tool
for advancing Nazism. And I'm going to quote again from

(01:12:32):
Else's essay. In contrast with the Hindu nationalists, but in
tune with Indian Marxists and Castists, she believed that the
concept nation and a program of nationalism could not apply
to India. In nineteen thirty eight, she used the slogan
make every Hindu and Indian nationalist, and every Indian nationalist
to Hindu. Now this seems to be something not legitimately, Yeah,
and she didn't really believe it. In her autobiography years later,

(01:12:55):
she expressed the belief that nationalism could only exist within
members of the same race, thought that all the different
casts in India were different races. And we're getting into
the weeds here too much. But it's important to understand
for what comes next that Saviitri Devi advocated for Hindu nationalism,
but not because she believed strongly in it. Because she
saw it as a useful tool for harming the British

(01:13:16):
Empire and advancing Nazism. Okay, it's her main goal.

Speaker 3 (01:13:19):
So she's merely co opting it for her own sinister purposes.

Speaker 1 (01:13:23):
It's a little more complicated than that because she also
loves it, like she's She's takes on a lot of
Hindu beliefs. It's this is a weird story and there's
no like super simple answer to it. But it's not
as simple as she just becomes Hindu and also Nazi.
Like it's weirder than that too.

Speaker 3 (01:13:44):
No one edited this out. I need people to know
what what I've been forced to endure. You just like
literally did that into the microphone.

Speaker 1 (01:13:53):
Literally it was hard.

Speaker 3 (01:13:54):
I had to I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (01:13:56):
I can see Robert right now, and he wiped his
nose on the mic and he was like, linked it
and then licked it.

Speaker 3 (01:14:04):
You licked Robert Evan, You licked it.

Speaker 1 (01:14:06):
All of this gets edited out now. Many Hindu nationalists
were very bullish about the Nazis because Great Britain owned
India and ruled it as a brutal colonial oppressor, and
they figured, you know, the enemy of my enemy, right.
Not all of them felt this way. There were a
lot of Hindu nationalists who were against the Nazis because
they were like, well, but they're Nazis, so again, I

(01:14:30):
can't paint everybody with the same brush. Yeah, but Savitri
got along very well with the set of Hindu nationalists
who are like, yeah, the Nazi seemed good. And she's
particularly taken with doctor Asit Krishna Mukshi, one of India's
few actual committed Nazis. In nineteen thirty seven and thirty eight,
Mukarshi started to publish a bi monthly pro Nazi magazine,

(01:14:53):
The New Mercury. Savitri met him in early nineteen thirty
eight and they didn't instantly fall in love, but she
fell in love with like his mind. She was probably bisexual,
but certainly wasn't interested in Mukershi in any way. But
she falls in love with like this guy's Nazism. Basically,
they're that kind of so they're an god. That's so,

(01:15:16):
I mean, yeah, it's not great.

Speaker 2 (01:15:18):
That's bleak because it's like, yeah, I mean, if you're
gonna marry a Nanzi and you're not even attracted to them,
no excuse, no excuse way, but you know what I mean, she.

Speaker 1 (01:15:31):
Has a little bit of an excuse. But we're getting
to it.

Speaker 3 (01:15:34):
So you are cutting this lady all kinds of slack, Robert.

Speaker 1 (01:15:37):
I'm just explaining her, Do you have a crime?

Speaker 2 (01:15:41):
Now?

Speaker 1 (01:15:42):
So she doesn't. They don't get together right away. She
loves his understanding of Nazi ideology, and particularly his emphasis
on the myths of the Old Arians, and Mukershi was
like obsessed with the Fule society the tool of society,
and it acquired a lot of their occult writing. So
he's like that kind of nerdy, and Mukershi seems to
like genuinely appreciate Savitri's ideas and the fact that she

(01:16:03):
was just as much of a nerd for Nazism. As
he was, but he was baffled by her insistence on
staying in India while Nazi Germany like rose to the
heights of its power in early nineteen thirty nine, He
asked her, what have you been doing in India all
these years, with your ideas and your potentialities, wasting your
time and energy. Go back to Europe where duty calls you.
Go and help the rebirth of Aryan Heathendom, where there

(01:16:24):
are still Rians strong and wide awake. Go to him
who is truly life and resurrection, the leader of the
Third Reich. Go at once. Next year will be too late.
And he was kind of right about that. But sat
who was convinced that she could do yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:16:37):
Yeah, I'm like, well historically okay, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:16:42):
Savitri, though, was convinced that she could do more for
the cause of Nazism in India than in Germany. She'd
become close with members of the Rashtriya Swaamsavik Song or
rss AD, a Hindu nationalist movement that were very similar
to the Nazis. The founder or one of the founders,
ab Hedjwar, formed the group to defend Hindu society from

(01:17:03):
daily onslaughts by outsiders and he included Muslim Indians as
members of that group. Like all fascist organizations, the RSS
had a uniform khaki shorts, a white shirt, and a
black cap. RSS members met daily to train with bamboo
beat sticks called lafi's and to learn about Hindutva Hindu nationalism.
In nineteen thirty nine, Savitri wrote a warning to the Hindus.

(01:17:25):
The book's forward was written by G. D. Savarkar, brother
to one of the co founders of the RSS, and
according to an article by South Asian affairs analyst Peter Friedrich,
quote Devi advanced V. D. Savarkar's thesis of Hindutfa that
India is a Hindu nation of Hindu people and only
for Hindu people. She claimed that Hindu society is India itself,
called Hinduism the national religion of India and suggested that

(01:17:47):
Hindu should tell non Hindus, we represent India, not you.
Therefore India is ours not yours. Shears urged Hindus to recover,
along with their national consciousness, their military virtues of old
to rebecome a military race. The method, she said, should
be the organization of the young men in pledge bound
military like batches with Hindu nationalism as their only ideal.

(01:18:10):
And here's where I pause to note that the current
Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, is a member of
the RSS. A warning to Hindus is still considered to
be a deeply influential text within the Hindu nationalist movement
and the RSS. Mody probably read it as a child
and a list of his crimes in the thousands of
murders and moss bombings and beatings carried out by Hindu
nationalists against Indian Muslims would go beyond the scope of

(01:18:32):
this episode, but it is worth noting that the current
authoritarian lurch by India, the world's largest democracy, owes at
least a decent amount to the work of Savitri Devi.
So that's cool, you're in love with her?

Speaker 3 (01:18:45):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (01:18:46):
I mean it is a sign of where this is
going that I kind of glossed over the fact that
she played a role in the establishment of what's starting
to become a fascist dictatorship in India.

Speaker 3 (01:18:57):
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (01:18:58):
We just have so much to cover, We have so
much to cover.

Speaker 2 (01:19:02):
We don't have time for the fascist dictatorship today. We
have some time, but we have Okay, Okay, well, we'll
make time. We'll make time for the fascist.

Speaker 1 (01:19:10):
In nineteen forty Britain and Germany went to war. Savitri's
extremist beliefs were well known at this point, and she
was forced to marry Mukershi in order to stay in
the country. So that's why they get married. It's basically
a green card thing. Yeah, got it. She described it
as a secless marriage, primarily to allow her to stay
in the country, and she did what she could for
Nazism while in India, spying on British military positions for

(01:19:31):
the Axis and facilitating communication between Subhas Chandra Bose, leader
of the National Indian Army, a pro Axis group, and
the Japanese government. In a different world, these contributions might
have played a role in a Japanese invasion of India,
but World War Two went the way it did, and
Hitler eventually shot himself in a bunker to avoid capture.

Speaker 3 (01:19:49):
I'm familiar.

Speaker 1 (01:19:49):
Vitry learned of his death through an overheard conversation from
two Muslim men on the Marabar coast. She was inconsolable
for days over the death of her hero and the
end of the belief system. She had dedicated her life
to championing but mcare. She told her not to worry.
This was merely part of the cycle of ages, and
the dark age brought on by Hitler's defeat would someday end,

(01:20:12):
and likewise, Jamie, one of this episode must now end. Okay,
but this dark age we'll continue on Thursday with part
two of the story of Savitri Devin. No, Okay, how
you doing, Jamie.

Speaker 3 (01:20:27):
Okay, I'm just unclenching.

Speaker 1 (01:20:31):
That's important for the next two minutes.

Speaker 3 (01:20:33):
And then we got to talk about it again.

Speaker 2 (01:20:35):
I got it.

Speaker 1 (01:20:35):
Abka always be clenching. Yeah, go plug your pluggables first.

Speaker 3 (01:20:40):
Oh right, Uh, leave that in. I want people to
know that. Yeah, overshare had to pee, and also leave
in Robert blowing his nose on the mic.

Speaker 1 (01:20:50):
Then Chris, you can edit out horrible.

Speaker 3 (01:20:54):
Chris, you can edit out the part where Robert is.

Speaker 2 (01:20:56):
Like young Delicious after licking his own it's not off
the mic, but everything else should probably stay in.

Speaker 1 (01:21:03):
I feel like this is legally abused.

Speaker 3 (01:21:06):
You could probably report me to HR. Could be fun,
could be fun.

Speaker 2 (01:21:11):
My Twitter is Jamie Loftus help man on my Instagram
is at Jamie christ Superstar and I'm touring for the
better part of February. You can go to my website,
Jamie loftus is Innocent dot com to find out where
yay yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:21:29):
And you can find Sophie on Twitter yeh, finding her
at Why Underscore Sophie Underscore Why. And that's it. That's
all you can find of us online, which are on
Behind the Bastards dot com, including the full free text
of Hitler's Priestess If you want to read this book.

(01:21:51):
The episode's over. Go stop the French from murdering cats. Yes, great,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}CZM Rewind: Part One: Savitri Devi The Woman Who Turned Nazism into a Religion