May 2, 2024 • 57 mins
Robert is joined again by Jamie Loftus to continue discussing Savitri Devi.
Jamie’s new Cool Zone Media show Sixteenth Minute launches on May 7th! Every week, she gets to know one of the internet’s most notorious main characters, and how the algorithm delivering them to you changes their brain and yours. Up first: Antoine Dodson, the dress, and Boston slide cop!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where every
week we read about a terrible person, and this one
is part two of the story of Savitri Debbie and
most importantly, today is the episode recorded on the tail
end of my recorder's battery. So we are fucking daredevils
right now.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Okay, I like Robert, you're edging.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Yeah, this is the podcast edging. Yes, this is edging.
This is what it means.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
This.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
I've never been totally cloi, but I think that this.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I am the first person to edge more than one
hundred thousand people at the same time.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Okay, that was a flex on many levels, and I'm
just going to wow through it.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
So that's what edging's all about.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Edging is just plowing through it. Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Wait.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Edging is when you're like, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Going when you bring someone to Yeah, you go to
like the edge of orgasm, but you keep stopping.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
And then your leg that's the joke.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
No, okay, okay, Well I've brought up the joke originally,
and now I'm explaining why I was corrected.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Yes, which is what all great comedians do.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
So so in October of nineteen forty five, Hitler's death
still fresh on her mind, Savitri Devi took part in
the Festival of Kali at the Kaligat Temple in Calcutta Now.
Kali is the Hindu deity of destruction, a blue skinned goddess,
and in traditional depictions, she wears a necklace of severed heads,
a skirt made from severed arms, and wields just about
(01:37):
every conceivable manner of ancient weapon in her many arms.
You see a lot of times. Yeah, it's really cool.
Like some of the statues of her are like fucking
twenty feet tall. Its metal as hell. Yeah. So, as
the goddess of destruction, Khali tends to inspire some pretty
powerful feelings. As Savitri stared up at the image of
her goddess, covered in gore and armed with massive swords
(01:59):
the size of small she belegged Khali for her blessing,
a blessing of violence and destruction against the Allied powers
who had destroyed her beloved Nazi Germany. She left the
ceremony convinced that it was now her duty to do
what she'd failed to do back in nineteen thirty nine.
She had to finally travel to Germany and take part
in the resistance to the Allies by any means necessary.
(02:20):
She left her twenty cats and the care of a
friend and left her.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
That's so mean to that friend.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Oh god, and the cats. Yeah, it's pretty wild cats behind.
This is a person who leaves her twenty cats behind
and the care of a friend to go be a Nazi,
like a month or two after Hitler died, Like months
after Hitler dies.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
You can get that text here, just like, hey, so,
like I have to go do a thing.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Could you look after my cats indefinitely?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Right?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:54):
No, could you look after my cats and definitely while
I go to try to resurrect Nazism in nineteen forties Germany.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Parentheses, there's twenty of the cats.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
By the way, Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
I mean that's all this good stuff, all the cruel.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
And horrible things that this woman has done, and I
don't even know all of them.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yet this has to rank like top ten. This is bad.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
It's pretty bad. She's a bad Yeah, she's not a
great friend or person. No, but she does finally reach
the birthplace of Hitlerism, the center of the ideology she'd
adopted for herself in nineteen forty eight. She later wrote
in her book Gold in the Furnace, that the gods
had ordained that I should have a glimpse of ruins,
bitter irony of fate. Germany at that point was still
(03:47):
largely destroyed and chopped up into four pieces by its
victorious enemies. So Very Tree's writing about this time shows
a wild ignorance about the extent of actual Nazi crimes,
because she's so horrified at how bad things are in Germany.
She writes, quote one remembers, I say that episode of
the Second War, as one beholds the ruins of all
the German cities, the plight of men and women in
(04:07):
the overcrowded areas still fit to live in, and all
the misery, all the bitterness consequent of that devilish bombing.
Streams of fire, tons of phosphorus relentlessly poured over his
people for five years. These were England's thanks to Adolf
Hitler for having shown mercy to her soldiers in his
hour of victory. These were the thanks of the United
States of America for his older orders not to shoot
the parachutists captured on German soil, Which is like, so
(04:31):
she's framing the British evacuations from the coast of France
as like German mercy, rather than incompetence on Hitler's behalf,
which they actually were, just rank and competence on Hitler's behalf. No,
he's also talking about the mercy of Germany and not
killing captured Allied paratroopers, which was illegal. And in doing this,
(04:54):
she's ignoring, for one example, the Malmedy massacre, in which
a Waffan SS troop massacred eight for American POWs with
machine guns. She's also ignoring the estimated three point three
million Russian POWs who died in German custody. But if
I wind up arguing actual history with a dead Nazi
will be here all day. So we're just gonna move
forward from that.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
But fair fair, she whitewashes things a bit, is the point. Yeah,
you a bit, just a bit a scooch. Just obviously
it's gonna be horrible seeing Germany after World War Two,
because like the bombing campaign over Germany was one of
the greatest crimes in history. That said, they kind of
had it coming.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
The tags tonight.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
I mean, fuck man, if anyone has ever deserved that,
it's fucking Nazi Germany.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
I mean they are they do present themselves as a
pretty clear target.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Good.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yeah, yeah, you can. You can say the Allies. Maybe
the Allies went overboard in some areas, while also being like,
but what were they supposed to do?
Speaker 2 (06:02):
I think a bit of an overreaction may have been
like it's historically You're like, okay, okay, yeah, you gotta
do something.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Yeah, you know, I it's it's something to not be
happy about. But of the list of historical crimes I'm
going to be outraged at, it's lower than, for example,
the ones committed by Nazi Germany. Yeah, sure, sure yeah. Now,
before visiting Germany, Savitri had hung out in Spheeden, where
(06:34):
a number of Nazis had fled after the war. There
she met s Finnhead and a Nazi supporting explorer and author,
and a number of former members of the Nazi Party
who were hiding out there because you know, it was
a crime to be a Nazi. Now, she told them
her mission was to deliver a message of hope to
the German people. Now, since Nazism was a bit unpopular
(06:55):
after the Second World War, she wasn't able to find
any printers in Sweden to actually print out this message
of hope. So instead Savitri Devi had to write out
five hundred leaflets by hand. Each featured a swastika, and
these words quote men and women of Germany, in the
midst of unspeakable riggers and suffering, hold fast to our
glorious national socialist faith and resist, Defy the people, Defy
(07:17):
the powers which work to do Nazify the German nation
and the whole world. Nothing can destroy what is built
on truth. We are pure gold, which can be tested
in the furnace. The furnace may glow and crackle, nothing
can destroy us. One day we will rebel and triumph again.
Hope and wait, Heil Hitler. So she writes five hundred
of these by hand, and wearing a sari and swastika earrings,
(07:40):
Savitri Devi takes a train across Germany and tosses out
hundred of leaflets over the course of about fifteen hours.
Attached to each was a gift, a small amount of coffee, sugar, butter,
sardines or cigarettes. She considered this journey to be an
act of religious devotion, describing the leaflets as written and
throne by the gaw through me. As her train crossed
(08:02):
from Germany into Belgium, she sang a Hindu hymn to Shiva.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
So she is a lot of commitment, A lot of
commitment is going into this.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Yes, yes, and that is all you can say.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Yeah, that is yeah. Now. So she gets inspired by
the success of her first visit and she plans two
more trips through Germany. She spent a little bit of
time resting in London and meeting up with fascists in London,
and because of all the fascists that are in London,
she's able to actually find a printer to print up
six thousand additional leaflets to take to Germany. Using a
connection to an old friend in France, she secured a
(08:38):
military permit to visit Germany for a longer period of time,
claiming not falsely that she intended to write a book
about the nation's post war trials. Her second trip into
Germany lasted three months and she successfully handed out all
six thousand leaflets. She also met with a number of
old Nazis. None of them were very high ranking. These
were like third rate Nazis, the former POWs. And some
(09:02):
of these POWs did have legitimate stories of Allied brutality
that they'd faced in captivity because, like you know, it
was a war. She interviewed numerous German citizens, introducing herself
at the start as a committed Nazi to gain their trust.
Savitri would then talk about her belief that Adolf Hitler
was still alive somewhere in the world and assure these
defeated Nazis that surely they were only two or three
(09:25):
years away from a revival of Nazism in Germany.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Imagine Hitler was your tupac, Like that is such a
wild that's like Hitler's.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
No, he's on an island somewhere. You don't understanding.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Album. Yeah, he's got really Yeah, you.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Don't the holograms a decoy? Oh yeah, sleek, I mean
I think we can. I mean that said, we both
agree that the hologram is a decoy.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Oh no, the hologram is absolutely decoy. Now.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
One one of these conversations that Savitri had with the
former Wehrmacht soldier is worth me reading out here. And
I'm going to quote again from the book Hitler's priestess quote,
continuing his narrative to post war conditions and occupied Germany,
the old fighter's face darkened nice people to talk about
freedom and justice. These damned democrats. They have tied us
hand and foot so we cannot move. They have muzzled
(10:21):
us so we can offer no resistance while they plunder
our country left and right, dismantle and carry off our
factories piece by piece, cut down our forests, take our oil,
our iron, our steel, all that we have, and into
the bargain, make people believe that we were to blame
for the war, These confounded liars. He lusted for revenge.
He longed for the day when the last Allies ran
for their lives to escape Germany, when Paris would lay
(10:42):
in ruins at its next German occupation, next time he
would show neither mercy nor good humor. Savitri Devi felt
a sense of mounting excitement as his mood became ever uglier,
and he began to describe in a raised voice how
he would kill his enemies. This was the spirit she sought,
the rolling eyes of a wounded animal, a war god
of the stone age for blood, barbaric magnificence. It was
a perfect meeting of minds, the violent, resentful German and
(11:05):
the Aryan prophetness of revenge. The day of reckoning seemed
already nearer. Okay, h she is a fun trip to Germany.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
I mean, you know, she had me at the beginning
with the you know, feeling plundered and betrayed by the
Democratic Party.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Sure, yes, that's a strong I was.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Not talking about the Democratic Party though.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
I know, I know, I just there, Rob Robert, I was.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Away from the mic at that point. What else can
I do?
Speaker 2 (11:34):
I can confirm you were not away from the mic
as I think everyone.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
I believe you're right upon. This is revisionists, This is absurd.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
This is Savitri Debbie levels of revisionist. You you were
the Savitri Debbie of this podcast.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
That's so mean. At least make me the Elizabeth Holmes
of this podcast.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Geez, you have not earned that yet, James.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Make me a fun one, Make me a fun bastard.
Come on, make me a fun tragic one with a
pony tail.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
At least.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Yeah, there's nothing tragic about Savitri.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
No.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
So she returned to France in December of nineteen forty
eight and immediately began to write a book, Gold in
the Furnace, about her experiences and her growing conception of
Hitlerism is something beyond what the old National Socialists had
really believed. In February of nineteen forty nine, three chapters
into her book, Savitri Devi was arrested by French authorities.
She spent a total of six months. Yeah, because you know,
(12:34):
it's illegal to be a Nazi for good reason.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
I'm like, wait, hold on, unpacked that yes, I understand.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Yeah. She spent a total of six months in pre
trialed attention and then prison after her conviction for spreading
Nazi propaganda. The time behind bars was good for Savitri,
as it historically often is for Nazis who fancy themselves
writers like her Idol Adolf Hitler. She used her prison
time as an excuse to finish her first book.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
She uses it as like a sabbatical, as one would
is sabbatical.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Yeah, it's an old Nazi story. She also took the
opportunity to meet even more old Nazis. A lot of
National Socialists were still imprisoned by the British occupation forces,
and these old fighters were all too happy to talk
with Savitri Devi. Her dearest friend in the prison was
a former wardress from the bergen Belsen concentration camp, a
(13:23):
quote beautiful looking woman, a blonde of about my age,
In Devi's words, she claimed that this war criminal had
the classical beauty of a chieftain's wife in ancient Germany.
And again, this was a woman who worked at a
concentration camp voluntarily.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
The language is so yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
And writes about like how cruel this woman's imprisonment was
and how nice the concentration camps was.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Like she's trash tsh, She's absolutely trash.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
I'm not gonna like spend a lot of time debunking
her shit like she's garbage.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Yeah, and it's crazy.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
I mean it's like she is the one that is
providing all of this information too.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
She is the source.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, she is the source. And again I can't say
it enough. She never had the kutzpa to actually go
to Nazi Germany while it existed. I think because number one,
she would have been disappointed because like none of this
this weird religious shit she attached to it was an
actual part of Nazism in Nazi Germany. Like she would
(14:24):
have like she would have been like a just like
she might have gotten knocked up by some Nazi, like
at the orders of Heinrich Kimler, But she wouldn't have
She wouldn't have been anything special in Nazi Germany. The
odds are good, Like maybe they would have tried to
use her to like propagandize because she knew a bunch
of languages. I don't know. They might have like had
to try to reach out to India. But probably she
(14:45):
would have just been another person. I don't know. I
think that's an interesting aspect of it that isn't emphasized enough.
She just wasn't willing to actually go to Nazi Germany,
this place, she claimed, ruled. Yeah, ugh, cool, cool, so well.
In late nineteen forty nine, Savitri Devi was again a
free woman, and she published her first book to widespread
(15:05):
acclaim from the international Nazi community. From this point on,
Devi became a prolific author, writing up every significant event
in her life through a mixture of supposedly nonfiction works
as well as fanciful tales. For example, she retold the
story of her first trip back to Europe and the
children's fable Long Whiskers and the Two Legged Goddess, whose
heroine is a cat loving Nazi named Heliodora.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
No, that cat can't be real.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Yeah, yeah, it's a real.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Book that sounds like random words selected from a uh, well.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
It all makes sense, like the Heliodor's early a self
insert characters everything cats, Helio, Savitri Devi's obsessed with sun,
gods and goddesses.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
God, how embarrassing for her.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
What's embarrassing is that Savitri writes that her self insert
fantasy character has quote no human feelings in the ordinary
sense of the word. She had been from her very
childhood much too profoundly shocked at the behavior of man
towards animals to have any sympathy for people suffering an
account of their being Jews.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
Oh, okay, the Holocaust?
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Is it bad? Have you seen what happened to cats
when I was a kid.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
But here's the quite a take.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
That is a wild take to be like, you know
how we resolve like violence towards cats also cause violence
towards people.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Yeah, surely all.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
The Holocaust is cool because cats have been mistreated? Is watching?
Speaker 3 (16:38):
She just like goes to a whole other place.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
She's like, did you know, like when you're having like
when you're having an argument with someone who doesn't want
to have a good faith argument with you, and you're
just like, well what about this?
Speaker 3 (16:48):
And they're like, well, what about cats? In France. What
about that? Huh? And you're like, I don't I've been
stunned like a pokemon. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Over in the next few years, Savitri wrote and conversed
with increasingly aged Nazis and gradually refined her theories about
the world, until in nineteen fifty eight she published what
would prove to be her magnum opus, The Lightning in
the Sun. In this work, the ideas Savitri had been
rattling around in her head all finally came together. Hitler,
she concluded, was a man against time, fighting to uphold
(17:23):
Aryan virtues and blood against the corruption of modernity. She
placed him at the center of her own trinity, one
that replaced the decadent Christian one she'd grown up despising,
and her trinity, I dare you to make less sense
than the trinity she picks.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
They're okay, yeah, no.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
I think who do you think? Who do you thinks? First?
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Hitler?
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Well, no, Hitler's the most important, but he's not the first.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Oh he's not the first.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
What though, it goes in order of it goes in
order of, like time period. So these are all historical figures.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
First one is definitely someone ancient Greek, no.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Ancient Egyptian Achan Naughton, the first Monotheist, he's generally called
he was like this, this pharaoh who declared himself the
Sun God and like tried to institute monotheism, and then
he died and everything he did was burned by the
people who came after him because they thought he was
an asshole. Okay, And it's weird because she like hates
monotheism so much, but he's like one of the people
(18:17):
she loves. I think just because he's the sun god
and she's got a.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Weird say, she'll make an exception. She'll give any sun
god a pass.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Basically, it's it's fucking weird. Second in her holy Trinity
is Genghis Kott.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
What does she and here's why why.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
It It wouldn't make sense. I mean, basically history's greatest conqueror.
He's a great conqueror and he's not Christian or Jewish
or anything, you know. Okay, Yeah, So Aka Naton is
the Sun and the con is the lightning and Hitler,
she believes, combines the best attributes of both the pharaoh's
(19:01):
wisdom with the strategic mind of Genghis Kot. Genghis Khan
succeeded in invading Russia during the winter. So I don't
know where you're coming from any question.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
This woman is okay.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
One of these two knew how to invade Russia and
it was not Hitler.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
And then is the third one Hitler or is there?
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Yeah? The third is Hitler because he combines the best
parts of act.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
This a terrible cartoon. She's not watched this cartoon wild.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah, it's so dumb. Yeah. So there's probably a couple
of reasons for her obsession with Acat. For one thing,
act was deeply revered by the Theosophical Society, which you
will remember from our uh Our episodes on anthroposophy, and
the Theosophical Society held a lot of ties also to
the Tuless Society and all the other weird little occult
(19:53):
groups who'd supported the Nazis early on. Acton had been
a utopian thinker who tried and failed to a stay
ablish a perfect city. Good Rich Clark, Savitri's biographer writes
that she saw his son worshipping cult as quote rejection
of all politics that promotes man's interest at a cost
to the beauty and abundance of nature. Which is just
invented by her.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Like she's yeah, I feel like maybe she's She's like
me and Jack Skellington, She's just kind of there for
the aesthetic and maybe doesn't fully understand what she is
all about the Okay, Jack Skellington, Yeah, that is okay, Okay,
now I'm now, I'm like, I understand this mindset.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
If this Holy Trinity doesn't work for you, consider embracing
the Holy Trinity of the products and services that support
this show.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Products, services, and god, what's the third one?
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Each each is one and a half of the trinity.
That's how good both products and services are.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Yeah, they add up to three products. Mm hmmm, we're back.
So God, there's so much to get through with this.
This woman's fucking stupid, stupid, fucking beliefs, but they're very important.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
They're stupid, and they're also kind.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Of they're so dumb and complicated. They're so dumb and complicated.
They all make sense. I'll say, like, Gal, they don't
make sense to the fact that they're true, but like,
based on her history and like the things that she imbibes,
they all makes I can see what why she came
to these conclusions, but they're super dumb. So the core
(21:36):
of her Nazism is a love of nature, which was
a big part of actual original Nazism too. They were
very into like like natural life and ship and like
taking care of the land and animal welfare. And some
of her early books that she wrote when the Nazis
were in power, but before she was explicitly a Nazi,
(21:56):
like The Impeachment of Man, don't explicitly reference Nazism. And
these books, like The Impeachment of Man is still kind
of popular among chunks of the New Age and environmentalist
movements today. Savitri Devi's passionate writing on animal rights is
actually one of the many little roads that exist between
the green movement and the neo Nazi movement, and it's
really fucked up. Dev herself famously railed against the Allied
(22:20):
forces purging Germany of its fascist organizations, saying that quote,
you cannot denazifying nature. She believed that nature was fundamentally nationalists,
national socialist.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
And yeah, that's a bad take.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
I'm gonna read a quote from the Imagement of Man now,
and I want to remind you there are people who
are like environmentalists who are not Nazis who read this
book today and don't really realize what's going on. Quote.
A civilization that makes such a ridiculous fuss about alleged
war crimes, acts of violence against the actual or potential
(22:56):
enemies of one's cause, and tolerates slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories
and circuses in the fur industry, infliction and 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 elite of
superman with a life centered faith, a natural human aristocracy
(23:17):
is beautiful on its own higher level, as the four
legged kings of the jungle might again rise and rule
upon its remains forever. So again, you see how because
of the kind of stuff she's written, she's there's there's
these bridges. She's a big part of why there's bridges
between the eco movement and the Nazi movement. And there
very much are on like the hard edge of the
(23:38):
of the of the eco movement, of the anti climate
change movement. There are Nazis and left wing activists who
kind of increasingly seem like Nazis in a lot of cases.
Just not to say that like even supporting radical environmental
action makes you a Nazi, it's to say that, like,
part of the what Sevitri achieved is building in roads
between these groups and the Nazi movement. So now more
(24:02):
there's a lot of people that get into Nazism through environmentalism,
and Savitri Devi's a part of that. And that's kind
of the story we're telling today.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Sazism really knows how to ruin a good thing.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
It wasn't as good at it before Savitri dev It's
always been a ruiner, but she really took it to
new levels.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Oh good, as long as she elevated how bad it was.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
So the Lightning in the Sun her opus, posits a
cyclical view of history. She believed that time began with
a Golden Age, in which it was dominated by the perfect.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Area like age.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Like a sun god. Yeah, And this degraded slowly into
a Silver Age and then a Bronze Age. And both
of these worse ages featured increased racial mixing that weakened
the arians. They also featured pernicious Jewish influence. The next
age is the kali Yuga, or dark Age, which Savitri
(24:58):
believed the world had all already entered into. She also
called this dark age the reign of the Jew.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
No.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Yeah, the only way out of this dark age was
for the Man against Time Hitler to gather up the
terrible weapons of the dark Age and use them to
bring about the return of the Golden Age, presumably through
genocidal purging of non arians and the establishment of a
strict racial hierarchy. Her book was dedicated quote to the
godlike individual of our times, the Man against Time, the
(25:28):
greatest European of all times, both sun and lightning. Yeah,
as a tribute of unfailing loyalty and love forever and
ever God.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
You know, there's been a lot said about fan culture.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
I don't agree with all of it, but you know,
this is a real argument against fan culture.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
This is the worst fan culture has ever gone. I
feel comfortable saying bad.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
This is this is this is this is the worst
it can go.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
This is bad stand culture.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
It's bad, bad, bad there and even the way that
she writes and structures these things, it kind of you
can hear that like interest in ancient history in there,
because it just sounds like she's kind of connecting these
lines that don't actually exist to make it sound like
to I mean kind of like the way she like
arguably maybe lifted some of her own like self mythologizing
(26:18):
from mind comps. Like she's just like putting something she
wants to say into a familiar framework.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Yeah, it's called syncretisy. Well, this is part of syncretism,
is like taking these other things that you like and
sticking it onto this thing. And this is like the
main things she goes down in history for doing to Nazism. Yeah,
now I have I have a lot of debates with
myself putting this together about how much detailed to get
(26:46):
into about Savitri's theories. There's a really dark, very vile
world of esoteric Hitlerist fantasy based in large part off
of her writing. And this shit is dangerous. It spreads
a kind of ideological infection that grabs impressionable children, primarily
in a vice like grip, and turns them into something
very dangerous. And a lot of people have died from this,
and I am not going to If you're very knowledgeable
(27:08):
about this, you will notice there is a lot of
things I'm leaving out just because like this is enough
to understand it. And I don't want to just like
be spreading weird Nazi propaganda to an audience.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
As you said, one hundred thousand people, the Robert that
is the most merciful thing you've ever done on this
entire podcast.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Yeah, it's just too dangerous in my opinion.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
That's good. That's yeah, I agree. And I don't even
know what it was.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
It's fucking weird, stupid shit. But yeah. The last thing
that's really important to understand about Savitri Devi's beliefs is
that she decided Hitler was what she called well, she
was not the only person. Other people had the same idea,
but she's one of the more prominent ones. The kali Yuga,
the tenth incarnation of Vishnu, and she used several segments
(27:55):
from August kubaz K's ill advised book The Young Hitler.
I knew Kubazek was Hitler's friend when they were like teenager.
He wrote a terrible book. It's valuable because it's the
only insight we haven't hit Hitler at that period, but
he clearly wrote it to make money.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Is it like my friend Dahmer? Is it like that? Yeah,
it's like that same vibe of like this horrible person. Yeah,
I knew you're like.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
We were buried cool. Yeah, but you also get the
feeling that Kubazek didn't really think he was horrible until
he like he was writing it initially to be in
a biography that was published under the Nazi regime as
like a pro Hitler piece of propaganda, so they lost
the war, and then he just kind of rewrote it
so that it could be like, well, now I'm just
I guess I'm just going to explain my evil friend
(28:40):
to the allies.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
It was so fucking sinister.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Oh my god, I mean the people. SHARE's a lot
of debates to have about Kubazek, but most historians will agree, well,
you have to read Kubazek. You have to take him
with like a lot of salt. Yeah, he's trying to
takes him with no salt at all. And she pulls
several passages from his book as like evidence that Hitler
(29:05):
was the Collie Yuga and was like channeling fucking Vishnu. Yeah,
it's this.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Woman does not understand Shades of Gray even remote.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
No, she's just okay.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
She would have written Shades of Gray though if she
had been around.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
I wish she.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Had, like against the better world.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yeah, as with literally every single person you've ever told
me about on this cursed show, Robert, everything would have
been better off if people had just channeled their horny
energy into fan fiction instead of brutal hate and murder
every single time.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Masturbating to fan fiction is the only things that will
save us from the next Hitler.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
It will absolutely and and and that's where the kylo
ren stands come in.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
If you know an angry person who spends too much
time writing fan fiction for under no circumstances, stop them,
encourage that behavior.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Yeah, them doing it of.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
I can't even begin to tell you.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Yeah, it's good.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Okay, So this is horrible, Okay, horrible, back to what
you were saying, that was horrible.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
So she like reads Kubazek and she becomes convinced that
a couple chunks of that book are evidence that Hitler
is channeling Vishnu, is the avatar of Vishnu. Yeah, so yeah,
there's like there are these moments in the book where like,
Hitler will like that that Kubazak writes very like purple Prosy,
where Hitler will like suddenly like in the middle of
(30:34):
a conversation, like make some sort of like grand statement
about the future. And it's like, maybe it's true because
he was Hitler, Like it wouldn't be the weirdest thing
of Hitler had always been that guy, right, sure. But
also Kubazek wrote this, well, after Hitler, you know, was
done with and it's entirely possible he was like, people
are going to expect him to make grand speeches that
are like dark and crazy about the future because he
(30:57):
was Hitler, and he threw them in there because that's
what people like, We don't know, ye. Yeah. So decades later,
Savitri Devi would claim that her initial inspiration for the
idea that Hitler was the calai Yuga had come from
a conversation she'd had in nineteen thirty six with Satyananda Swami,
the founder and head of the Hindu mission where she'd worked.
(31:19):
She claims that Satyananda used to say, and I'm cluding
directly from her writing here, Adolf Hitler is the reincarnation
of the god Vishnu. Vishnu is the aspect of the
Hindu Trinity who goes to keep things from rushing to destruction,
to keep them back to go on against time. Time
is destruction. You have to destroy in order to create again.
But there are forces that try to postpone destruction. And
he said Hitler was the reincarnation of that force, and
(31:40):
he was. He was. But it's a nice thing to hear,
a very refreshing thing to hear from a Hindu sage.
I told him, I came here because I'm really a pagan,
a worshiper of the Sun, and I believe in the
pagan reaction of Emperor Julian. And I came to India
to get, if possible, a sort of tropical equivalent of
what we have had in Europe before Christianity. And I
am not a disciple of any Indian. I'm at aciple
of Adolf Hitl. He said, good, good, Adolf Hitler. He's
(32:02):
as much a Hindu as any of our Hindus. He's
an incarnation of the god Vishnu, probably never happened, but
might have, I mean.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Particulate.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Yeah, it is. But one of the things that Hindu scholars,
who again are generally very critical of a lot of
all of these claims, if Saveetris, will point out some
like one of the kind of downsides of sort of
this very open aspect of Hindu mythology where it kind
of accepts new things and new gods and other religions,
and like it's very open canonically in a lot of ways.
(32:33):
And so there were a lot of Indians who would
have who very well might have been like, oh, okay,
you worship Hitler. Sure, he's probably like this, like because
like they're just looking at a way to understand through
their religion this thing that matters to you. Like, yeah, again,
who knows, you'll get different opinions on this than ane
who you go to. So, yeah, we don't know what's true.
(32:56):
What is important is that after Savitri Devi starts writing
about all this shit, a lot of Nazis come to
believe it. In fact, the reeling and wounded remaining Nazis
of the West felt like Savitri's occult musings were basically
a breath of fresh air, and she spent her middle
and later years traveling around and meeting fascists all over
the world. In nineteen sixty one, she made her first
direct connection with the English neo Nazis of the British
(33:19):
National Party or b and P. As the war years
receded further and further away, an international agglomeration of fascist
inclined folks began to link up and plan together for
a resurgence of Nazism. Savitri Devi was at the center
of it. As this paragraph from Hitler's Priestess illustrates quote.
She lost no time in contacting Andrew Fontaine, the president
(33:39):
of the B and P. A spring camp attended by
twenty delegates from European nationalist groups was held on Fonteane's
estate at Narford at Narford, Norfolk, in May of nineteen
sixty one. Those present included Robert Lyon, a young leader
in the American National States Rights Party, which violently opposed
to segregation in the South, representatives from German neo Nazi groups,
and Savitri Devi. Another key figure was EXSS Lieutenant Friedrich
(34:02):
Borth born in nineteen twenty eight. This blue eyed, blonde
Austrian Nazi had served in the Luftwaffa and the VAFNSS.
As a teenage officer, he had commanded an assault group
and won the Iron Cross. After serving a three year
jail sentence in post war Vienna, he published an SS
veteran magazine, Das Camrade, which was swiftly suppressed by the
Soviet authorities. Thereafter, he was connected with numerous extreme right
(34:23):
wing groups and attended the most international fascist gatherings. He
led the boom Heimertured Yugen until its banning in nineteen
fifty nine, and then branded the Legion Europa, the Austrian
section of THEO Arts, GEO and Europe, another international grouping
inspired by the French Oas in Algeria and Belgian rancors
over the loss of the Congo. After a busy schedule
of lectures at Narfurt, the participants celebrated their Nordic racial
(34:45):
identity with Folkish songs and tankards of traditional ale around
the campfire. So you see what's happening here, Savitri Devi
gets pulled into not just neo Nazi groups and not
just old Nazis. She's meeting with the American States Rights Party,
she's meeting with like the Belgians who are angry that
they've lost control of the Congo, and she's meeting with
all these old neo Nazis and the British National Party
(35:06):
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Would you say at this point she is out of
her depth in terms of I can't believe you did that.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
No, no, I did no, no, no, I think she No,
she's not out of her depth at all. Okay, she is.
What she is doing is helping to draw She's not
the only force doing this, but she's helping to draw
these groups together by providing the early Like these are
all separate groups, like the Cause of desegregation, like a
(35:35):
lot of racists who don't want America to segregated, fought
against the Nazis. She is a part of all these different,
like very far right groups, including Nazis, coming together and
in a lot of cases, starting to embrace these weird
this weird Nazi religion she's she's invented as something to
unify all of them. That's what starts to happen in
(35:56):
this period. And that's what's really unique about this period
is like these are all groups like the Belgian, like
pro Congolese control of like the Belgium, Like the Belgians
weren't pro Nazi, but like these Belgians start to get
pro Nazi now because like they realize there's like this
white identity thing, but also this weird religion that is
(36:16):
more attractive to them than actual national socialism would have been.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
It's interesting, I mean it seems like part of her
effectiveness lies in like having so many little bits of
things for people to latch onto, so that even if
you don't agree with the larger ideology, there's a worm
on the hook that'll get you in.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
That's called syncretism. That's what syncretism really is, is like
all these different things kind of it's like a Katamari
of ideology with like Nazism at the core, but all
these things sticking to it, and these things get other
people stuck to them, so like, yeah, that's what we
start to see happening in the early nineteen sixties. In
nineteen sixty two, Savitri was in England again for a
(36:56):
gathering of worldwide Nazis that included Bastard pod main character
George Lincoln Rockwell.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
I know this, ALR. Things are about to get way. Yeah,
not great, okay.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Savitri Devi was one of the signatories for the World
Union of National Socialists, a proposed organization to form a
quote combat efficient international apparatus to facilitate a return to
Nazi values and the extermination of non whites from Western nations.
Now ones wound up being a bust for several reasons,
including the fact that Rockwell was almost immediately kicked out
(37:39):
of the United Kingdom, but he and Savitri developed a
friendly relationship. The leader of the American Nazi Party had
been on the lookout for a new American fascist religion,
something esoteric and enchanting that he could use to draw
in new members in a way that national socialist political
theory and unvarnished racism just did not, And he must
have thought The Lightning in the Sun had some potential
(38:00):
for he published an abridged version of the book in
the National Socialist World magazine, The.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
Lightning in the Sun over to the US.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
The Lightning in the Sun, it should be said, could
be a YA book that like is out right now.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
I it might be to be entirely honest, and that
YA book might actually be Nazi propaganda hidden his young
adult thing.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
Which oh you can't put it past?
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Yeah yeah, no, no, no, much like for example, the
Bad Ace of Bass. Wait what Yeah, the Ace of
Base were Nazis? Did you not hear that?
Speaker 2 (38:37):
No?
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Oh? Adam Todd Brown wrote a great article about this
for correct, the Base of Aces was a Nazi submarine base.
If you watch the music video for All That She
Wants is another baby. The woman who just wants another
baby to get on welfare is like holding a star
of David the entire time, and there's all these long,
lingering shots of it. There's a bunch of other stuff.
The sign that they saw is clearly a swastika if
you listen to the lyrics, it's fucked up.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
But we have to blaze past that right now.
Speaker 3 (39:03):
I found a book called Lightning on the Sun.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
That's pretty close. It's about a Nazi shit.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
It's about a guy named Glenn Schmidt. Win's a store, Yeah, Glenn.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Schmidt, who might be Nazi.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
A moon god.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Yep, that's some Nazi shit there. It is or anti Nazi,
since Nazi Savitri was all about the sun God, it
could be either. Really wow. So Savitri Devi would go
on to spend the bulk of her remaining years in India,
traveling irregularly when the demands of her national socialist beliefs
took her around the world. She remained convinced all her
life that Hitler would return, either in a new incarnation
(39:41):
or after revealing that he had somehow survived the war
and lead a resurgent Nazis into global victory. She retired
in nineteen seventy, living for a time at the home
of her friend Francois Dior in England. That's the Dior
you're thinking of? Really, yeah, it's well, it's the it's
like the daughter I think of the woman who created
the line. Yeah, mean granddaughter.
Speaker 3 (40:02):
Oh good?
Speaker 1 (40:03):
She was a big Nazi backer before the war.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Yeah wow, okay, learning more? I love fashion knowledge.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Savitri Devi was kicked out of Door's house eventually for
her twin habits of refusing to bathe ever and chewing
on garlic constantly.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
Can we disgusting?
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Come on girl? Okay, that's what gets the reaction, Sophie,
because she's terrible.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
I was chewing on garlic a lot over the summer.
It helps preserve your voice. I don't think that's why
she was doing it.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Does Do we have to bathe while chewing on garlic?
Speaker 3 (40:45):
Do we know what happened to her cats?
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (40:49):
Solid question, Jamie.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Well, she had numerous pet cats.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
What happened to those twenty cats she left to Nazi
Germany with?
Speaker 1 (40:57):
She I was just about to say. She spent most
of her remaining years living alone in India with dozens,
sometimes of pet cats. And at least one cobra. She
always had a fuck load of cats. Yeah, this woman
couldn't get away from her cats. One thing about her.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
You wou think that cats live long enough that the
original twenty cats she left behind would still be alive.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
But then I think a lot of them were. I
think a lot of them weren't.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
Oh, she was taking them with.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
I don't know precisely, but my assumption, based on everything
I know Savitri Devi, is that she would have absolutely
tried to get back her original cats if it was possible.
She was very into cats. Yeah, she would not have
abandoned the cats. I don't think she was real consistent
about that part. Yeah. As she grew older, Devi became
(41:43):
more and more convinced that the United States represented the
most fertile ground for the growth of the esoteric Nazi
religions he had spent her life helping to construct. In
nineteen eighty two, she decided to travel to the United
States to do what she could do to help American
Nazism break out as a national force. She died on
the way while staying at a friend's house in Great Britain.
(42:03):
Her ashes, however, finally made it across the pond to
the United States of America, and American Nazis laid her
to rest by sprinkling her on their hero's grave, George
Lincoln Rockwell. So Rockwell and Savitri Devi's share a grave.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Yeah, wow, Okay, So she's like, okay.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
Yeah, you know who doesn't share a grave with George
Lincoln Rockwell and Savitri Devi.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
The products and services were about to hawk. Yes, for now,
you never know.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
For now, for now, we're back.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
We're back.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
So Savitri Devi's dead. Good finally, But this is not
the end for her, not really, because starting in the
late nineteen seventies, a famous Holocaust and iron publisher, Ernst Zundel,
had found her old work and started pushing it back
into circulation. Now, but it only developed a limited audience
in those early post war days. But now, nearly twenty
(43:02):
years later, people were ready for esoteric hitlersm the book
Hitler's Priestess notes. By the late nineteen seventies, the historical
experience of the Third Reich was quickly receding into the past,
as popular literature and films ably demonstrated Nazism was becoming
something mythical, even fantastic and also plastic that could be
molded and combined with novel associations lyrics. By publishing the
(43:27):
work of Savitri Devi, Zundel aimed to create a new
coltic interest in Hitler, linking him to ancient mysteries, the
world of nature, and powerful religious symbols drawn from the
orients she was just saying there by saying it's plastic,
because he's pointing out we have all these weird movies
now about like Nazis on the Moon. You know, you've
got these fanciful stories like Wolfenstein, these games about like Nazi,
(43:47):
like all of this, this this fictional sort of world
that's been built up, like mythology built up around the Nazis,
usually not by people who are actual Nazis, and a
lot of cases just by people who are like, well,
they're the worst people ever, so I can make them
the bad guys. That's an easy go for a bad guy. Sure,
But Zundel is like, this is a fucking opportunity because
(44:09):
kids are growing up reading about these cool, evil, bad
guy Nazis. And for the same reason that kids loved
dressing up as Imperial Stormtroopers from Star Wars, kids get
interested in the Nazis from this, and he sees Savitri
Devi's work as like, I can fucking get a shitload
of kids interested in Nazism by pushing this stuff back
out there. Oh okay, and he's fucking right, yeah now,
(44:31):
yeah yeah. Another important architect of this whole thing, and
we're not going to get into enough, but I will
do an episode on in the future is a Chilean
Nazi named Miguel Serrano. And it's from Miguel that we
actually get the term esoteric hitlersm Serano and Devi seem
to have reached essentially the same conclusion about Hitler as
(44:51):
an avatar of Vishnu through slightly different intellectual roots. Miguel
was a student of Young and a mythrist which we
just don't have enough time to get into, and a
member of the day once again, the Theosophical Society. He
was also an early Avid Western practitioner of yoga. Miguel
corresponded with dev during her lifetime. Before he died in
(45:14):
two thousand and nine. He gave interviews to Nazi magazines
with names like Black Sun, where he said this about
Savitri Devi. Quote, Savitri Devi is the greatest warrior after
Adolf Hitler, Rudolph Hess and Joseph Gebels. Moreover, she was
the first to discover the ancient and spiritual power behind Hitlerism.
She envisioned a new religion and inaugurated a sanctuary for
(45:34):
Hitler in India. She was, as I myself am anti Christian.
She initiated completely on her own all that I have
developed up until now. It is not mere coincidence that
the Spanish Catholics published an attack against Savitri Devi, Otto
Ron and me. It was very late in her life
when we started to write each other. We just missed
each other in Europe by one week. I arrived a
few days after her death. I think that Savitri Devi
(45:56):
will be the greatest sister of all the priests of
esoteric hitlersmasts of Wotan.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
And he's like wearing a male feminist T shirt while
he does this. He's like, I don't hate women. I
like this.
Speaker 3 (46:07):
I like the worst woman I've ever heard of love.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
He would not have worn him, I will say that much.
But you're getting the spirit of the guy, right, Yeah,
he's a real gigantic piece of shit. We're not getting
into it up, but he gives her credit as like
the real motive force behind the religion that Hitlerism becomes,
even though he's also like kind of independently coming to
a lot of the same conclusions and even earlier in
(46:31):
some cases. Like she's the popularizer in a lot of way.
She has a big role in that. And yeah, he's
we'll talk about him more later today. Savitri Devi's fingerprints
can be found all over the radical and murderous chunks
of the fascist right. The Fair Creek Division an accelerationist
neo Nazi organization that's a very similar to Adam Woffen Division,
(46:54):
similar enough to talk about for the purposes of this podcast.
Both of them seek to bring about the isolent destruction
of the current world order through to stabilizing attacks. The
Fair Creek Division directly cites dev as an inspiration. The
group's gab bio includes this dev quote, creation and destruction
are one to the eyes of one who can see beauty.
(47:15):
Savitri's beliefs went on to have a big influence on
Adam Waffen too and the members of the base who
weren't FBI agents, anti fascists or journalists, which is basically
those seven guys who got arrested.
Speaker 3 (47:26):
That's familiar.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Yeah, yeah, in these groups like the Base, that we
can see some hint of what makes Savitri dev so dangerous.
The leader of the Michigan Cell of Adam Waffen Division,
who was docked a few days before I wrote this episode,
reached his position in charge of the Michigan Cell when
he was fifteen years old. The three members of the
(47:49):
Base who were arrested in Georgia in the process of
trying to spark a race war were ages nineteen, twenty one,
and twenty five, respectively. These acceleration esoteric Hitlerists tend to
be young, and there is disagreement on the average age
at which people enter cults, but the work of doctor
John G. Clark, a psych professor at Harvard who surveyed
(48:10):
five hundred current and former cult members, suggests an average
age of nineteen and a half for new cult members.
He also points out that most new cult members are male.
This is because young men are particularly vulnerable to being
enraptured by ideologies that offer them a sense of purpose
and belonging. It's one of the reasons the same age
group is the ideal recruitment population for soldiers, but esoteric
(48:32):
hitlersm doesn't just suck these kids in because they're young.
And to explain this new part, I'm going to have
to talk a little bit about techism, and I am
very sorry.
Speaker 4 (48:42):
No, do.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
We absolutely, absolutely, yeah, we.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Really Dochism that is a joking parody of religion invented
by the shit posters four chan and eight chan during
gamer Gate. It's very dumb and talking about it makes
me feel very silly. But the short of it is
keechism started out, and for probably most people still is
a dumb gag and a way for them to make
fun of members of minority groups by pretending to be
(49:09):
members of a victimized religion because they think that's funny.
The whole thing focuses around shit posting and spreading memes.
But as the Trump campaign ramped up and this weird
internet movement started to have an impact on the real world, some,
particularly unhinged Anon, started to take keechism more seriously, while
others just thought the joke kept getting funnier and spread
it around. For that reason, Lawrence Murray, a writer for
(49:32):
the fascist podcast The Right Stuff, was probably the first
person to purposefully meld keechism with Savitri Devi's philosophy into
something he called esoteric keechism. He started shitting out memes
that replaced Hitler with Pepe as an avatar of Vishnu,
stuff like that It's very dumb. When interviewed, Murray claims
he was only half joking with the whole idea, but
(49:54):
like any joke of the sort on the Internet, it
spread like wildfire, and a certain chunk of the people
who saw it took it seriously, which led them to
the work of more serious fascist thinkers, people like Savitri Devi,
and led some of them into accelerationist groups like Adam
Woffen and the Bass. It is not a coincidence that
andders Brevic, the Utoya, Norway shooter who massacred dozens of
(50:16):
children at a left wing summer camp, directly praised Hindu
nationalism in his manifesto. It is also not a total
coincidence that both anders Brevik and Brenton Tarrant, the christ shooter,
claimed to be Knights Templar, members of a Christian order
fighting against Muslims, basically, and it is not a coincidence
that the Urban Dictionary page for Keekism, written by a
(50:38):
gamer gator, describes it as a red pilled ideology originating
from the true Knights templar. And again, all of this
is joking. All of this is not joking. It's both
at once. It's the contradiction of modern fucking yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
Well that's yeah. The greatest trick the Devil ever played
was irony poisoning, because you just can't.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
Yeah, you can't argue with that. And yeah, some people
will say, and it's possible. There is are some central
figures behind this spread of syncretism, like sinister individuals who
have like kind of put all this together purposefully, or
at least put pieces of it together purposefully.
Speaker 3 (51:17):
Yea.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
But I tend to be of the belief that most,
if not all, of it is amorphous. In Acephalis, it
happened without a head, without much intention on its own.
There may have been bits of intention here and there,
like esoteric techism, but a lot of it just happened
because of the sort of structure Savitri Devi built. It's
just kind of the natural result of the amorphous and
(51:39):
sticky nature of the faith that she created. If Hindu
mythology and ancient Egyptian history can be folded in with
Adolf Hitler and the Arian myth. Why can't Cechism wind
up in there too? Why can't the Knights Templar fit
in there too? All these weird little subcultures you've got,
Norse mythology, chan culture, gamer culture, new age, spiritualism, environmentalism,
even veganism. All these things appeal heavily to a lot
(52:03):
of young people. And the more little bridges that you
can build between these different communities and actual extermination is
Nazi beliefs, the more young men will kind of accidentally
fall in and get caught in this net. It's like
a tunnel spider's web. And at the end, the great
innovations have each read, every brought like that's that's the
innovation she brought to Nazism. She took what was a
(52:25):
dead political system that couldn't spread outside of Germany, not really,
and turned it into a living, syncretic religion, something with vitality,
something capable of mutating and absorbing and staying relevant, and
something capable of inspiring young men to commit murder. And
the memory of Adolf Hitler nearly a century after his.
Speaker 3 (52:44):
Death, Could you give me that word one more time.
Speaker 1 (52:46):
Of this syncretism.
Speaker 2 (52:48):
Syncretism, Yeah, I mean it's and if you are able to,
you know, find a way to get a group of
people who are looking for something to believe in, who
are maybe a little bit okay, you know what, You're right?
Speaker 3 (53:02):
I was, but yeah, just like finding a.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
Group of vulnerable, vulnerable people ideologically that need something to
believe in and put a delicious chocolate coating on the
outside of it.
Speaker 3 (53:16):
It seems to it works. It works.
Speaker 1 (53:22):
How do you feel about Savitri? You a fan? You
gotta check out her books.
Speaker 3 (53:26):
I can't say I'm a fan she. I don't think
that we would.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
I don't think we would have been friends in junior
high and I don't think we would have been friends now.
I yeah, no, I mean I truly. And it is
interesting that we don't talk about her. I had no
idea this person existed.
Speaker 1 (53:45):
I why do you think that is? There's a degree
to there's a degree to which I think a lot
of people who know about her and are like researchers
didn't really want to because there's this worry about making
a bigger deal of it than it is. Sure, it's
kind of like I didn't really write about eight Chan
much until the christ Churt shooting, when it was like, okay,
well now we got to the base. Now it's gotten
(54:07):
to those points, like all right, we got to fucking
talk about Savitri dev Debi and esoteric hitlersm Like, we
got to get some of this out there. I do
think it's also just like not super well known. I
think she was seen like really, to be entirely honest,
I think most of her efforts would have looked like
a failure to most observers. Observers up until maybe at
(54:29):
the earliest decade ago. Okay, you know, people who were
really aware of what was going on would have known earlier,
but most people, even pretty well informed people, would have
been like, well, this is kind of a dead end
and just something to like make fun of up until
we start to the internet. Really is what provides this
with the last ingredient it needs to take on.
Speaker 2 (54:50):
Oh yeah, she like pioneered the red pill mentality, like
it's yeah, yeah, she was a.
Speaker 1 (54:55):
Big part of that. Yeah, and we're not like Julius
Evola is a big part of this. Who Steve Bannon
fucking loves Let's me not let me.
Speaker 2 (55:02):
Not take any credit from any of the Red pil Pioneers.
Speaker 3 (55:06):
Everyone deserves to take up space.
Speaker 1 (55:09):
We'll get them all. We'll get them all on the show.
Speaker 3 (55:11):
We will, we will. They deserve it. Mm hmm, well
serve it well, Robert as usual. This was absolutely horrifying
and you've ruined my day. Thank you?
Speaker 1 (55:22):
Good? Yeah, that's the goal.
Speaker 3 (55:23):
Okay, good, And.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
I've got I've got some pluggables, like you can listen
to my podcast, My Year in Mensa. It's online now,
there's only four episodes. It's real quick. I'm on Twitter
at Jamie Loftus help Instagram at Jamie car Superstar on
tour for the next month or so. Jamie Loftus is
innocent dot com. And that's what I have to say.
(55:48):
I love when we talk about the warship in the
entire world and at the end you're like, so, what's
your Twitter handle?
Speaker 1 (55:54):
This is Twitter? If you really want to learn more
about esotery, Hitler is follow Sophie's Twitter. Why underscore, Sophie underscore?
Why Rob absolutely violent?
Speaker 3 (56:10):
Cannot shut make me fire you no? You know, Hitler,
you know what?
Speaker 2 (56:17):
Have been on Twitter for less than forty eight hours
already getting accused of crimes. Robert's gonna be canceled by
the time this came out because he blew his nose
on the mic no less than four times hours.
Speaker 1 (56:31):
I am, I am ill, You're ill.
Speaker 2 (56:34):
I know, but you know, but I mean now you're
just now you're just bragging about it.
Speaker 3 (56:40):
Follow our podcast at Bessard's pod on Instagram.
Speaker 1 (56:44):
Don't tell me what to do, so oh sorry, listeners,
what to do.
Speaker 3 (56:49):
For get it together?
Speaker 1 (56:51):
I know I didn't sleep last night and the.
Speaker 3 (56:54):
Episodes nobody I know we've had the Nazism sleep last night?
That does that excuse the nose blowing? My friend having
trouble sleeping? Does it excuse the nose blowing? No?
Speaker 1 (57:09):
No, No, Robert, Sophie, Robert, that's going to be okay.
It is not.
Speaker 3 (57:17):
We're always getting mad. And the episode my friend and
go take a nap.
Speaker 1 (57:20):
Yeah, the episode is over. Yay, Go hug a cat
or dog? Cats? Can you stop Nazis cat and encourage
the angriest person you know to write fan fiction.
Speaker 3 (57:34):
That's truly the greatest service you can do.
Speaker 1 (57:35):
Both of those things are critical.
Speaker 2 (57:38):
All right, Episode's over, Bye bye,
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where every
week we read about a terrible person, and this one
is part two of the story of Savitri Debbie and
most importantly, today is the episode recorded on the tail
end of my recorder's battery. So we are fucking daredevils
right now.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Okay, I like Robert, you're edging.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Yeah, this is the podcast edging. Yes, this is edging.
This is what it means.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
This.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
I've never been totally cloi, but I think that this.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I am the first person to edge more than one
hundred thousand people at the same time.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Okay, that was a flex on many levels, and I'm
just going to wow through it.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
So that's what edging's all about.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Edging is just plowing through it. Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Wait.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Edging is when you're like, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Going when you bring someone to Yeah, you go to
like the edge of orgasm, but you keep stopping.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
And then your leg that's the joke.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
No, okay, okay, Well I've brought up the joke originally,
and now I'm explaining why I was corrected.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Yes, which is what all great comedians do.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
So so in October of nineteen forty five, Hitler's death
still fresh on her mind, Savitri Devi took part in
the Festival of Kali at the Kaligat Temple in Calcutta Now.
Kali is the Hindu deity of destruction, a blue skinned goddess,
and in traditional depictions, she wears a necklace of severed heads,
a skirt made from severed arms, and wields just about
(01:37):
every conceivable manner of ancient weapon in her many arms.
You see a lot of times. Yeah, it's really cool.
Like some of the statues of her are like fucking
twenty feet tall. Its metal as hell. Yeah. So, as
the goddess of destruction, Khali tends to inspire some pretty
powerful feelings. As Savitri stared up at the image of
her goddess, covered in gore and armed with massive swords
(01:59):
the size of small she belegged Khali for her blessing,
a blessing of violence and destruction against the Allied powers
who had destroyed her beloved Nazi Germany. She left the
ceremony convinced that it was now her duty to do
what she'd failed to do back in nineteen thirty nine.
She had to finally travel to Germany and take part
in the resistance to the Allies by any means necessary.
(02:20):
She left her twenty cats and the care of a
friend and left her.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
That's so mean to that friend.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Oh god, and the cats. Yeah, it's pretty wild cats behind.
This is a person who leaves her twenty cats behind
and the care of a friend to go be a Nazi,
like a month or two after Hitler died, Like months
after Hitler dies.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
You can get that text here, just like, hey, so,
like I have to go do a thing.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Could you look after my cats indefinitely?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Right?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:54):
No, could you look after my cats and definitely while
I go to try to resurrect Nazism in nineteen forties Germany.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Parentheses, there's twenty of the cats.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
By the way, Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
I mean that's all this good stuff, all the cruel.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
And horrible things that this woman has done, and I
don't even know all of them.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yet this has to rank like top ten. This is bad.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
It's pretty bad. She's a bad Yeah, she's not a
great friend or person. No, but she does finally reach
the birthplace of Hitlerism, the center of the ideology she'd
adopted for herself in nineteen forty eight. She later wrote
in her book Gold in the Furnace, that the gods
had ordained that I should have a glimpse of ruins,
bitter irony of fate. Germany at that point was still
(03:47):
largely destroyed and chopped up into four pieces by its
victorious enemies. So Very Tree's writing about this time shows
a wild ignorance about the extent of actual Nazi crimes,
because she's so horrified at how bad things are in Germany.
She writes, quote one remembers, I say that episode of
the Second War, as one beholds the ruins of all
the German cities, the plight of men and women in
(04:07):
the overcrowded areas still fit to live in, and all
the misery, all the bitterness consequent of that devilish bombing.
Streams of fire, tons of phosphorus relentlessly poured over his
people for five years. These were England's thanks to Adolf
Hitler for having shown mercy to her soldiers in his
hour of victory. These were the thanks of the United
States of America for his older orders not to shoot
the parachutists captured on German soil, Which is like, so
(04:31):
she's framing the British evacuations from the coast of France
as like German mercy, rather than incompetence on Hitler's behalf,
which they actually were, just rank and competence on Hitler's behalf. No,
he's also talking about the mercy of Germany and not
killing captured Allied paratroopers, which was illegal. And in doing this,
(04:54):
she's ignoring, for one example, the Malmedy massacre, in which
a Waffan SS troop massacred eight for American POWs with
machine guns. She's also ignoring the estimated three point three
million Russian POWs who died in German custody. But if
I wind up arguing actual history with a dead Nazi
will be here all day. So we're just gonna move
forward from that.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
But fair fair, she whitewashes things a bit, is the point. Yeah,
you a bit, just a bit a scooch. Just obviously
it's gonna be horrible seeing Germany after World War Two,
because like the bombing campaign over Germany was one of
the greatest crimes in history. That said, they kind of
had it coming.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
The tags tonight.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
I mean, fuck man, if anyone has ever deserved that,
it's fucking Nazi Germany.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
I mean they are they do present themselves as a
pretty clear target.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Good.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yeah, yeah, you can. You can say the Allies. Maybe
the Allies went overboard in some areas, while also being like,
but what were they supposed to do?
Speaker 2 (06:02):
I think a bit of an overreaction may have been
like it's historically You're like, okay, okay, yeah, you gotta
do something.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Yeah, you know, I it's it's something to not be
happy about. But of the list of historical crimes I'm
going to be outraged at, it's lower than, for example,
the ones committed by Nazi Germany. Yeah, sure, sure yeah. Now,
before visiting Germany, Savitri had hung out in Spheeden, where
(06:34):
a number of Nazis had fled after the war. There
she met s Finnhead and a Nazi supporting explorer and author,
and a number of former members of the Nazi Party
who were hiding out there because you know, it was
a crime to be a Nazi. Now, she told them
her mission was to deliver a message of hope to
the German people. Now, since Nazism was a bit unpopular
(06:55):
after the Second World War, she wasn't able to find
any printers in Sweden to actually print out this message
of hope. So instead Savitri Devi had to write out
five hundred leaflets by hand. Each featured a swastika, and
these words quote men and women of Germany, in the
midst of unspeakable riggers and suffering, hold fast to our
glorious national socialist faith and resist, Defy the people, Defy
(07:17):
the powers which work to do Nazify the German nation
and the whole world. Nothing can destroy what is built
on truth. We are pure gold, which can be tested
in the furnace. The furnace may glow and crackle, nothing
can destroy us. One day we will rebel and triumph again.
Hope and wait, Heil Hitler. So she writes five hundred
of these by hand, and wearing a sari and swastika earrings,
(07:40):
Savitri Devi takes a train across Germany and tosses out
hundred of leaflets over the course of about fifteen hours.
Attached to each was a gift, a small amount of coffee, sugar, butter,
sardines or cigarettes. She considered this journey to be an
act of religious devotion, describing the leaflets as written and
throne by the gaw through me. As her train crossed
(08:02):
from Germany into Belgium, she sang a Hindu hymn to Shiva.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
So she is a lot of commitment, A lot of
commitment is going into this.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Yes, yes, and that is all you can say.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Yeah, that is yeah. Now. So she gets inspired by
the success of her first visit and she plans two
more trips through Germany. She spent a little bit of
time resting in London and meeting up with fascists in London,
and because of all the fascists that are in London,
she's able to actually find a printer to print up
six thousand additional leaflets to take to Germany. Using a
connection to an old friend in France, she secured a
(08:38):
military permit to visit Germany for a longer period of time,
claiming not falsely that she intended to write a book
about the nation's post war trials. Her second trip into
Germany lasted three months and she successfully handed out all
six thousand leaflets. She also met with a number of
old Nazis. None of them were very high ranking. These
were like third rate Nazis, the former POWs. And some
(09:02):
of these POWs did have legitimate stories of Allied brutality
that they'd faced in captivity because, like you know, it
was a war. She interviewed numerous German citizens, introducing herself
at the start as a committed Nazi to gain their trust.
Savitri would then talk about her belief that Adolf Hitler
was still alive somewhere in the world and assure these
defeated Nazis that surely they were only two or three
(09:25):
years away from a revival of Nazism in Germany.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Imagine Hitler was your tupac, Like that is such a
wild that's like Hitler's.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
No, he's on an island somewhere. You don't understanding.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Album. Yeah, he's got really Yeah, you.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Don't the holograms a decoy? Oh yeah, sleek, I mean
I think we can. I mean that said, we both
agree that the hologram is a decoy.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Oh no, the hologram is absolutely decoy. Now.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
One one of these conversations that Savitri had with the
former Wehrmacht soldier is worth me reading out here. And
I'm going to quote again from the book Hitler's priestess quote,
continuing his narrative to post war conditions and occupied Germany,
the old fighter's face darkened nice people to talk about
freedom and justice. These damned democrats. They have tied us
hand and foot so we cannot move. They have muzzled
(10:21):
us so we can offer no resistance while they plunder
our country left and right, dismantle and carry off our
factories piece by piece, cut down our forests, take our oil,
our iron, our steel, all that we have, and into
the bargain, make people believe that we were to blame
for the war, These confounded liars. He lusted for revenge.
He longed for the day when the last Allies ran
for their lives to escape Germany, when Paris would lay
(10:42):
in ruins at its next German occupation, next time he
would show neither mercy nor good humor. Savitri Devi felt
a sense of mounting excitement as his mood became ever uglier,
and he began to describe in a raised voice how
he would kill his enemies. This was the spirit she sought,
the rolling eyes of a wounded animal, a war god
of the stone age for blood, barbaric magnificence. It was
a perfect meeting of minds, the violent, resentful German and
(11:05):
the Aryan prophetness of revenge. The day of reckoning seemed
already nearer. Okay, h she is a fun trip to Germany.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
I mean, you know, she had me at the beginning
with the you know, feeling plundered and betrayed by the
Democratic Party.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Sure, yes, that's a strong I was.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Not talking about the Democratic Party though.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
I know, I know, I just there, Rob Robert, I was.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Away from the mic at that point. What else can
I do?
Speaker 2 (11:34):
I can confirm you were not away from the mic
as I think everyone.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
I believe you're right upon. This is revisionists, This is absurd.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
This is Savitri Debbie levels of revisionist. You you were
the Savitri Debbie of this podcast.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
That's so mean. At least make me the Elizabeth Holmes
of this podcast.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Geez, you have not earned that yet, James.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Make me a fun one, Make me a fun bastard.
Come on, make me a fun tragic one with a
pony tail.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
At least.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Yeah, there's nothing tragic about Savitri.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
No.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
So she returned to France in December of nineteen forty
eight and immediately began to write a book, Gold in
the Furnace, about her experiences and her growing conception of
Hitlerism is something beyond what the old National Socialists had
really believed. In February of nineteen forty nine, three chapters
into her book, Savitri Devi was arrested by French authorities.
She spent a total of six months. Yeah, because you know,
(12:34):
it's illegal to be a Nazi for good reason.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
I'm like, wait, hold on, unpacked that yes, I understand.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Yeah. She spent a total of six months in pre
trialed attention and then prison after her conviction for spreading
Nazi propaganda. The time behind bars was good for Savitri,
as it historically often is for Nazis who fancy themselves
writers like her Idol Adolf Hitler. She used her prison
time as an excuse to finish her first book.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
She uses it as like a sabbatical, as one would
is sabbatical.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Yeah, it's an old Nazi story. She also took the
opportunity to meet even more old Nazis. A lot of
National Socialists were still imprisoned by the British occupation forces,
and these old fighters were all too happy to talk
with Savitri Devi. Her dearest friend in the prison was
a former wardress from the bergen Belsen concentration camp, a
(13:23):
quote beautiful looking woman, a blonde of about my age,
In Devi's words, she claimed that this war criminal had
the classical beauty of a chieftain's wife in ancient Germany.
And again, this was a woman who worked at a
concentration camp voluntarily.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
The language is so yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
And writes about like how cruel this woman's imprisonment was
and how nice the concentration camps was.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Like she's trash tsh, She's absolutely trash.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
I'm not gonna like spend a lot of time debunking
her shit like she's garbage.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Yeah, and it's crazy.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
I mean it's like she is the one that is
providing all of this information too.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
She is the source.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, she is the source. And again I can't say
it enough. She never had the kutzpa to actually go
to Nazi Germany while it existed. I think because number one,
she would have been disappointed because like none of this
this weird religious shit she attached to it was an
actual part of Nazism in Nazi Germany. Like she would
(14:24):
have like she would have been like a just like
she might have gotten knocked up by some Nazi, like
at the orders of Heinrich Kimler, But she wouldn't have
She wouldn't have been anything special in Nazi Germany. The
odds are good, Like maybe they would have tried to
use her to like propagandize because she knew a bunch
of languages. I don't know. They might have like had
to try to reach out to India. But probably she
(14:45):
would have just been another person. I don't know. I
think that's an interesting aspect of it that isn't emphasized enough.
She just wasn't willing to actually go to Nazi Germany,
this place, she claimed, ruled. Yeah, ugh, cool, cool, so well.
In late nineteen forty nine, Savitri Devi was again a
free woman, and she published her first book to widespread
(15:05):
acclaim from the international Nazi community. From this point on,
Devi became a prolific author, writing up every significant event
in her life through a mixture of supposedly nonfiction works
as well as fanciful tales. For example, she retold the
story of her first trip back to Europe and the
children's fable Long Whiskers and the Two Legged Goddess, whose
heroine is a cat loving Nazi named Heliodora.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
No, that cat can't be real.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Yeah, yeah, it's a real.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Book that sounds like random words selected from a uh, well.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
It all makes sense, like the Heliodor's early a self
insert characters everything cats, Helio, Savitri Devi's obsessed with sun,
gods and goddesses.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
God, how embarrassing for her.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
What's embarrassing is that Savitri writes that her self insert
fantasy character has quote no human feelings in the ordinary
sense of the word. She had been from her very
childhood much too profoundly shocked at the behavior of man
towards animals to have any sympathy for people suffering an
account of their being Jews.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
Oh, okay, the Holocaust?
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Is it bad? Have you seen what happened to cats
when I was a kid.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
But here's the quite a take.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
That is a wild take to be like, you know
how we resolve like violence towards cats also cause violence
towards people.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Yeah, surely all.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
The Holocaust is cool because cats have been mistreated? Is watching?
Speaker 3 (16:38):
She just like goes to a whole other place.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
She's like, did you know, like when you're having like
when you're having an argument with someone who doesn't want
to have a good faith argument with you, and you're
just like, well what about this?
Speaker 3 (16:48):
And they're like, well, what about cats? In France. What
about that? Huh? And you're like, I don't I've been
stunned like a pokemon. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Over in the next few years, Savitri wrote and conversed
with increasingly aged Nazis and gradually refined her theories about
the world, until in nineteen fifty eight she published what
would prove to be her magnum opus, The Lightning in
the Sun. In this work, the ideas Savitri had been
rattling around in her head all finally came together. Hitler,
she concluded, was a man against time, fighting to uphold
(17:23):
Aryan virtues and blood against the corruption of modernity. She
placed him at the center of her own trinity, one
that replaced the decadent Christian one she'd grown up despising,
and her trinity, I dare you to make less sense
than the trinity she picks.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
They're okay, yeah, no.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
I think who do you think? Who do you thinks? First?
Speaker 3 (17:41):
Hitler?
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Well, no, Hitler's the most important, but he's not the first.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Oh he's not the first.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
What though, it goes in order of it goes in
order of, like time period. So these are all historical figures.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
First one is definitely someone ancient Greek, no.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Ancient Egyptian Achan Naughton, the first Monotheist, he's generally called
he was like this, this pharaoh who declared himself the
Sun God and like tried to institute monotheism, and then
he died and everything he did was burned by the
people who came after him because they thought he was
an asshole. Okay, And it's weird because she like hates
monotheism so much, but he's like one of the people
(18:17):
she loves. I think just because he's the sun god
and she's got a.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Weird say, she'll make an exception. She'll give any sun
god a pass.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Basically, it's it's fucking weird. Second in her holy Trinity
is Genghis Kott.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
What does she and here's why why.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
It It wouldn't make sense. I mean, basically history's greatest conqueror.
He's a great conqueror and he's not Christian or Jewish
or anything, you know. Okay, Yeah, So Aka Naton is
the Sun and the con is the lightning and Hitler,
she believes, combines the best attributes of both the pharaoh's
(19:01):
wisdom with the strategic mind of Genghis Kot. Genghis Khan
succeeded in invading Russia during the winter. So I don't
know where you're coming from any question.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
This woman is okay.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
One of these two knew how to invade Russia and
it was not Hitler.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
And then is the third one Hitler or is there?
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Yeah? The third is Hitler because he combines the best
parts of act.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
This a terrible cartoon. She's not watched this cartoon wild.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah, it's so dumb. Yeah. So there's probably a couple
of reasons for her obsession with Acat. For one thing,
act was deeply revered by the Theosophical Society, which you
will remember from our uh Our episodes on anthroposophy, and
the Theosophical Society held a lot of ties also to
the Tuless Society and all the other weird little occult
(19:53):
groups who'd supported the Nazis early on. Acton had been
a utopian thinker who tried and failed to a stay
ablish a perfect city. Good Rich Clark, Savitri's biographer writes
that she saw his son worshipping cult as quote rejection
of all politics that promotes man's interest at a cost
to the beauty and abundance of nature. Which is just
invented by her.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Like she's yeah, I feel like maybe she's She's like
me and Jack Skellington, She's just kind of there for
the aesthetic and maybe doesn't fully understand what she is
all about the Okay, Jack Skellington, Yeah, that is okay, Okay,
now I'm now, I'm like, I understand this mindset.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
If this Holy Trinity doesn't work for you, consider embracing
the Holy Trinity of the products and services that support
this show.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Products, services, and god, what's the third one?
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Each each is one and a half of the trinity.
That's how good both products and services are.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Yeah, they add up to three products. Mm hmmm, we're back.
So God, there's so much to get through with this.
This woman's fucking stupid, stupid, fucking beliefs, but they're very important.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
They're stupid, and they're also kind.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Of they're so dumb and complicated. They're so dumb and complicated.
They all make sense. I'll say, like, Gal, they don't
make sense to the fact that they're true, but like,
based on her history and like the things that she imbibes,
they all makes I can see what why she came
to these conclusions, but they're super dumb. So the core
(21:36):
of her Nazism is a love of nature, which was
a big part of actual original Nazism too. They were
very into like like natural life and ship and like
taking care of the land and animal welfare. And some
of her early books that she wrote when the Nazis
were in power, but before she was explicitly a Nazi,
(21:56):
like The Impeachment of Man, don't explicitly reference Nazism. And
these books, like The Impeachment of Man is still kind
of popular among chunks of the New Age and environmentalist
movements today. Savitri Devi's passionate writing on animal rights is
actually one of the many little roads that exist between
the green movement and the neo Nazi movement, and it's
really fucked up. Dev herself famously railed against the Allied
(22:20):
forces purging Germany of its fascist organizations, saying that quote,
you cannot denazifying nature. She believed that nature was fundamentally nationalists,
national socialist.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
And yeah, that's a bad take.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
I'm gonna read a quote from the Imagement of Man now,
and I want to remind you there are people who
are like environmentalists who are not Nazis who read this
book today and don't really realize what's going on. Quote.
A civilization that makes such a ridiculous fuss about alleged
war crimes, acts of violence against the actual or potential
(22:56):
enemies of one's cause, and tolerates slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories
and circuses in the fur industry, infliction and 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 elite of
superman with a life centered faith, a natural human aristocracy
(23:17):
is beautiful on its own higher level, as the four
legged kings of the jungle might again rise and rule
upon its remains forever. So again, you see how because
of the kind of stuff she's written, she's there's there's
these bridges. She's a big part of why there's bridges
between the eco movement and the Nazi movement. And there
very much are on like the hard edge of the
(23:38):
of the of the eco movement, of the anti climate
change movement. There are Nazis and left wing activists who
kind of increasingly seem like Nazis in a lot of cases.
Just not to say that like even supporting radical environmental
action makes you a Nazi, it's to say that, like,
part of the what Sevitri achieved is building in roads
between these groups and the Nazi movement. So now more
(24:02):
there's a lot of people that get into Nazism through environmentalism,
and Savitri Devi's a part of that. And that's kind
of the story we're telling today.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Sazism really knows how to ruin a good thing.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
It wasn't as good at it before Savitri dev It's
always been a ruiner, but she really took it to
new levels.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Oh good, as long as she elevated how bad it was.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
So the Lightning in the Sun her opus, posits a
cyclical view of history. She believed that time began with
a Golden Age, in which it was dominated by the perfect.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Area like age.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Like a sun god. Yeah, And this degraded slowly into
a Silver Age and then a Bronze Age. And both
of these worse ages featured increased racial mixing that weakened
the arians. They also featured pernicious Jewish influence. The next
age is the kali Yuga, or dark Age, which Savitri
(24:58):
believed the world had all already entered into. She also
called this dark age the reign of the Jew.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
No.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Yeah, the only way out of this dark age was
for the Man against Time Hitler to gather up the
terrible weapons of the dark Age and use them to
bring about the return of the Golden Age, presumably through
genocidal purging of non arians and the establishment of a
strict racial hierarchy. Her book was dedicated quote to the
godlike individual of our times, the Man against Time, the
(25:28):
greatest European of all times, both sun and lightning. Yeah,
as a tribute of unfailing loyalty and love forever and
ever God.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
You know, there's been a lot said about fan culture.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
I don't agree with all of it, but you know,
this is a real argument against fan culture.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
This is the worst fan culture has ever gone. I
feel comfortable saying bad.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
This is this is this is this is the worst
it can go.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
This is bad stand culture.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
It's bad, bad, bad there and even the way that
she writes and structures these things, it kind of you
can hear that like interest in ancient history in there,
because it just sounds like she's kind of connecting these
lines that don't actually exist to make it sound like
to I mean kind of like the way she like
arguably maybe lifted some of her own like self mythologizing
(26:18):
from mind comps. Like she's just like putting something she
wants to say into a familiar framework.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Yeah, it's called syncretisy. Well, this is part of syncretism,
is like taking these other things that you like and
sticking it onto this thing. And this is like the
main things she goes down in history for doing to Nazism. Yeah,
now I have I have a lot of debates with
myself putting this together about how much detailed to get
(26:46):
into about Savitri's theories. There's a really dark, very vile
world of esoteric Hitlerist fantasy based in large part off
of her writing. And this shit is dangerous. It spreads
a kind of ideological infection that grabs impressionable children, primarily
in a vice like grip, and turns them into something
very dangerous. And a lot of people have died from this,
and I am not going to If you're very knowledgeable
(27:08):
about this, you will notice there is a lot of
things I'm leaving out just because like this is enough
to understand it. And I don't want to just like
be spreading weird Nazi propaganda to an audience.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
As you said, one hundred thousand people, the Robert that
is the most merciful thing you've ever done on this
entire podcast.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Yeah, it's just too dangerous in my opinion.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
That's good. That's yeah, I agree. And I don't even
know what it was.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
It's fucking weird, stupid shit. But yeah. The last thing
that's really important to understand about Savitri Devi's beliefs is
that she decided Hitler was what she called well, she
was not the only person. Other people had the same idea,
but she's one of the more prominent ones. The kali Yuga,
the tenth incarnation of Vishnu, and she used several segments
(27:55):
from August kubaz K's ill advised book The Young Hitler.
I knew Kubazek was Hitler's friend when they were like teenager.
He wrote a terrible book. It's valuable because it's the
only insight we haven't hit Hitler at that period, but
he clearly wrote it to make money.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Is it like my friend Dahmer? Is it like that? Yeah,
it's like that same vibe of like this horrible person. Yeah,
I knew you're like.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
We were buried cool. Yeah, but you also get the
feeling that Kubazek didn't really think he was horrible until
he like he was writing it initially to be in
a biography that was published under the Nazi regime as
like a pro Hitler piece of propaganda, so they lost
the war, and then he just kind of rewrote it
so that it could be like, well, now I'm just
I guess I'm just going to explain my evil friend
(28:40):
to the allies.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
It was so fucking sinister.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Oh my god, I mean the people. SHARE's a lot
of debates to have about Kubazek, but most historians will agree, well,
you have to read Kubazek. You have to take him
with like a lot of salt. Yeah, he's trying to
takes him with no salt at all. And she pulls
several passages from his book as like evidence that Hitler
(29:05):
was the Collie Yuga and was like channeling fucking Vishnu. Yeah,
it's this.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Woman does not understand Shades of Gray even remote.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
No, she's just okay.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
She would have written Shades of Gray though if she
had been around.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
I wish she.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Had, like against the better world.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yeah, as with literally every single person you've ever told
me about on this cursed show, Robert, everything would have
been better off if people had just channeled their horny
energy into fan fiction instead of brutal hate and murder
every single time.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Masturbating to fan fiction is the only things that will
save us from the next Hitler.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
It will absolutely and and and that's where the kylo
ren stands come in.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
If you know an angry person who spends too much
time writing fan fiction for under no circumstances, stop them,
encourage that behavior.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Yeah, them doing it of.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
I can't even begin to tell you.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Yeah, it's good.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Okay, So this is horrible, Okay, horrible, back to what
you were saying, that was horrible.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
So she like reads Kubazek and she becomes convinced that
a couple chunks of that book are evidence that Hitler
is channeling Vishnu, is the avatar of Vishnu. Yeah, so yeah,
there's like there are these moments in the book where like,
Hitler will like that that Kubazak writes very like purple Prosy,
where Hitler will like suddenly like in the middle of
(30:34):
a conversation, like make some sort of like grand statement
about the future. And it's like, maybe it's true because
he was Hitler, Like it wouldn't be the weirdest thing
of Hitler had always been that guy, right, sure. But
also Kubazek wrote this, well, after Hitler, you know, was
done with and it's entirely possible he was like, people
are going to expect him to make grand speeches that
are like dark and crazy about the future because he
(30:57):
was Hitler, and he threw them in there because that's
what people like, We don't know, ye. Yeah. So decades later,
Savitri Devi would claim that her initial inspiration for the
idea that Hitler was the calai Yuga had come from
a conversation she'd had in nineteen thirty six with Satyananda Swami,
the founder and head of the Hindu mission where she'd worked.
(31:19):
She claims that Satyananda used to say, and I'm cluding
directly from her writing here, Adolf Hitler is the reincarnation
of the god Vishnu. Vishnu is the aspect of the
Hindu Trinity who goes to keep things from rushing to destruction,
to keep them back to go on against time. Time
is destruction. You have to destroy in order to create again.
But there are forces that try to postpone destruction. And
he said Hitler was the reincarnation of that force, and
(31:40):
he was. He was. But it's a nice thing to hear,
a very refreshing thing to hear from a Hindu sage.
I told him, I came here because I'm really a pagan,
a worshiper of the Sun, and I believe in the
pagan reaction of Emperor Julian. And I came to India
to get, if possible, a sort of tropical equivalent of
what we have had in Europe before Christianity. And I
am not a disciple of any Indian. I'm at aciple
of Adolf Hitl. He said, good, good, Adolf Hitler. He's
(32:02):
as much a Hindu as any of our Hindus. He's
an incarnation of the god Vishnu, probably never happened, but
might have, I mean.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Particulate.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Yeah, it is. But one of the things that Hindu scholars,
who again are generally very critical of a lot of
all of these claims, if Saveetris, will point out some
like one of the kind of downsides of sort of
this very open aspect of Hindu mythology where it kind
of accepts new things and new gods and other religions,
and like it's very open canonically in a lot of ways.
(32:33):
And so there were a lot of Indians who would
have who very well might have been like, oh, okay,
you worship Hitler. Sure, he's probably like this, like because
like they're just looking at a way to understand through
their religion this thing that matters to you. Like, yeah, again,
who knows, you'll get different opinions on this than ane
who you go to. So, yeah, we don't know what's true.
(32:56):
What is important is that after Savitri Devi starts writing
about all this shit, a lot of Nazis come to
believe it. In fact, the reeling and wounded remaining Nazis
of the West felt like Savitri's occult musings were basically
a breath of fresh air, and she spent her middle
and later years traveling around and meeting fascists all over
the world. In nineteen sixty one, she made her first
direct connection with the English neo Nazis of the British
(33:19):
National Party or b and P. As the war years
receded further and further away, an international agglomeration of fascist
inclined folks began to link up and plan together for
a resurgence of Nazism. Savitri Devi was at the center
of it. As this paragraph from Hitler's Priestess illustrates quote.
She lost no time in contacting Andrew Fontaine, the president
(33:39):
of the B and P. A spring camp attended by
twenty delegates from European nationalist groups was held on Fonteane's
estate at Narford at Narford, Norfolk, in May of nineteen
sixty one. Those present included Robert Lyon, a young leader
in the American National States Rights Party, which violently opposed
to segregation in the South, representatives from German neo Nazi groups,
and Savitri Devi. Another key figure was EXSS Lieutenant Friedrich
(34:02):
Borth born in nineteen twenty eight. This blue eyed, blonde
Austrian Nazi had served in the Luftwaffa and the VAFNSS.
As a teenage officer, he had commanded an assault group
and won the Iron Cross. After serving a three year
jail sentence in post war Vienna, he published an SS
veteran magazine, Das Camrade, which was swiftly suppressed by the
Soviet authorities. Thereafter, he was connected with numerous extreme right
(34:23):
wing groups and attended the most international fascist gatherings. He
led the boom Heimertured Yugen until its banning in nineteen
fifty nine, and then branded the Legion Europa, the Austrian
section of THEO Arts, GEO and Europe, another international grouping
inspired by the French Oas in Algeria and Belgian rancors
over the loss of the Congo. After a busy schedule
of lectures at Narfurt, the participants celebrated their Nordic racial
(34:45):
identity with Folkish songs and tankards of traditional ale around
the campfire. So you see what's happening here, Savitri Devi
gets pulled into not just neo Nazi groups and not
just old Nazis. She's meeting with the American States Rights Party,
she's meeting with like the Belgians who are angry that
they've lost control of the Congo, and she's meeting with
all these old neo Nazis and the British National Party
(35:06):
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Would you say at this point she is out of
her depth in terms of I can't believe you did that.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
No, no, I did no, no, no, I think she No,
she's not out of her depth at all. Okay, she is.
What she is doing is helping to draw She's not
the only force doing this, but she's helping to draw
these groups together by providing the early Like these are
all separate groups, like the Cause of desegregation, like a
(35:35):
lot of racists who don't want America to segregated, fought
against the Nazis. She is a part of all these different,
like very far right groups, including Nazis, coming together and
in a lot of cases, starting to embrace these weird
this weird Nazi religion she's she's invented as something to
unify all of them. That's what starts to happen in
(35:56):
this period. And that's what's really unique about this period
is like these are all groups like the Belgian, like
pro Congolese control of like the Belgium, Like the Belgians
weren't pro Nazi, but like these Belgians start to get
pro Nazi now because like they realize there's like this
white identity thing, but also this weird religion that is
(36:16):
more attractive to them than actual national socialism would have been.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
It's interesting, I mean it seems like part of her
effectiveness lies in like having so many little bits of
things for people to latch onto, so that even if
you don't agree with the larger ideology, there's a worm
on the hook that'll get you in.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
That's called syncretism. That's what syncretism really is, is like
all these different things kind of it's like a Katamari
of ideology with like Nazism at the core, but all
these things sticking to it, and these things get other
people stuck to them, so like, yeah, that's what we
start to see happening in the early nineteen sixties. In
nineteen sixty two, Savitri was in England again for a
(36:56):
gathering of worldwide Nazis that included Bastard pod main character
George Lincoln Rockwell.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
I know this, ALR. Things are about to get way. Yeah,
not great, okay.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Savitri Devi was one of the signatories for the World
Union of National Socialists, a proposed organization to form a
quote combat efficient international apparatus to facilitate a return to
Nazi values and the extermination of non whites from Western nations.
Now ones wound up being a bust for several reasons,
including the fact that Rockwell was almost immediately kicked out
(37:39):
of the United Kingdom, but he and Savitri developed a
friendly relationship. The leader of the American Nazi Party had
been on the lookout for a new American fascist religion,
something esoteric and enchanting that he could use to draw
in new members in a way that national socialist political
theory and unvarnished racism just did not, And he must
have thought The Lightning in the Sun had some potential
(38:00):
for he published an abridged version of the book in
the National Socialist World magazine, The.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
Lightning in the Sun over to the US.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
The Lightning in the Sun, it should be said, could
be a YA book that like is out right now.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
I it might be to be entirely honest, and that
YA book might actually be Nazi propaganda hidden his young
adult thing.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
Which oh you can't put it past?
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Yeah yeah, no, no, no, much like for example, the
Bad Ace of Bass. Wait what Yeah, the Ace of
Base were Nazis? Did you not hear that?
Speaker 2 (38:37):
No?
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Oh? Adam Todd Brown wrote a great article about this
for correct, the Base of Aces was a Nazi submarine base.
If you watch the music video for All That She
Wants is another baby. The woman who just wants another
baby to get on welfare is like holding a star
of David the entire time, and there's all these long,
lingering shots of it. There's a bunch of other stuff.
The sign that they saw is clearly a swastika if
you listen to the lyrics, it's fucked up.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
But we have to blaze past that right now.
Speaker 3 (39:03):
I found a book called Lightning on the Sun.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
That's pretty close. It's about a Nazi shit.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
It's about a guy named Glenn Schmidt. Win's a store, Yeah, Glenn.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Schmidt, who might be Nazi.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
A moon god.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Yep, that's some Nazi shit there. It is or anti Nazi,
since Nazi Savitri was all about the sun God, it
could be either. Really wow. So Savitri Devi would go
on to spend the bulk of her remaining years in India,
traveling irregularly when the demands of her national socialist beliefs
took her around the world. She remained convinced all her
life that Hitler would return, either in a new incarnation
(39:41):
or after revealing that he had somehow survived the war
and lead a resurgent Nazis into global victory. She retired
in nineteen seventy, living for a time at the home
of her friend Francois Dior in England. That's the Dior
you're thinking of? Really, yeah, it's well, it's the it's
like the daughter I think of the woman who created
the line. Yeah, mean granddaughter.
Speaker 3 (40:02):
Oh good?
Speaker 1 (40:03):
She was a big Nazi backer before the war.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
Yeah wow, okay, learning more? I love fashion knowledge.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Savitri Devi was kicked out of Door's house eventually for
her twin habits of refusing to bathe ever and chewing
on garlic constantly.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
Can we disgusting?
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Come on girl? Okay, that's what gets the reaction, Sophie,
because she's terrible.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
I was chewing on garlic a lot over the summer.
It helps preserve your voice. I don't think that's why
she was doing it.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Does Do we have to bathe while chewing on garlic?
Speaker 3 (40:45):
Do we know what happened to her cats?
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (40:49):
Solid question, Jamie.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Well, she had numerous pet cats.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
What happened to those twenty cats she left to Nazi
Germany with?
Speaker 1 (40:57):
She I was just about to say. She spent most
of her remaining years living alone in India with dozens,
sometimes of pet cats. And at least one cobra. She
always had a fuck load of cats. Yeah, this woman
couldn't get away from her cats. One thing about her.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
You wou think that cats live long enough that the
original twenty cats she left behind would still be alive.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
But then I think a lot of them were. I
think a lot of them weren't.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
Oh, she was taking them with.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
I don't know precisely, but my assumption, based on everything
I know Savitri Devi, is that she would have absolutely
tried to get back her original cats if it was possible.
She was very into cats. Yeah, she would not have
abandoned the cats. I don't think she was real consistent
about that part. Yeah. As she grew older, Devi became
(41:43):
more and more convinced that the United States represented the
most fertile ground for the growth of the esoteric Nazi
religions he had spent her life helping to construct. In
nineteen eighty two, she decided to travel to the United
States to do what she could do to help American
Nazism break out as a national force. She died on
the way while staying at a friend's house in Great Britain.
(42:03):
Her ashes, however, finally made it across the pond to
the United States of America, and American Nazis laid her
to rest by sprinkling her on their hero's grave, George
Lincoln Rockwell. So Rockwell and Savitri Devi's share a grave.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Yeah, wow, Okay, So she's like, okay.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
Yeah, you know who doesn't share a grave with George
Lincoln Rockwell and Savitri Devi.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
The products and services were about to hawk. Yes, for now,
you never know.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
For now, for now, we're back.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
We're back.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
So Savitri Devi's dead. Good finally, But this is not
the end for her, not really, because starting in the
late nineteen seventies, a famous Holocaust and iron publisher, Ernst Zundel,
had found her old work and started pushing it back
into circulation. Now, but it only developed a limited audience
in those early post war days. But now, nearly twenty
(43:02):
years later, people were ready for esoteric hitlersm the book
Hitler's Priestess notes. By the late nineteen seventies, the historical
experience of the Third Reich was quickly receding into the past,
as popular literature and films ably demonstrated Nazism was becoming
something mythical, even fantastic and also plastic that could be
molded and combined with novel associations lyrics. By publishing the
(43:27):
work of Savitri Devi, Zundel aimed to create a new
coltic interest in Hitler, linking him to ancient mysteries, the
world of nature, and powerful religious symbols drawn from the
orients she was just saying there by saying it's plastic,
because he's pointing out we have all these weird movies
now about like Nazis on the Moon. You know, you've
got these fanciful stories like Wolfenstein, these games about like Nazi,
(43:47):
like all of this, this this fictional sort of world
that's been built up, like mythology built up around the Nazis,
usually not by people who are actual Nazis, and a
lot of cases just by people who are like, well,
they're the worst people ever, so I can make them
the bad guys. That's an easy go for a bad guy. Sure,
But Zundel is like, this is a fucking opportunity because
(44:09):
kids are growing up reading about these cool, evil, bad
guy Nazis. And for the same reason that kids loved
dressing up as Imperial Stormtroopers from Star Wars, kids get
interested in the Nazis from this, and he sees Savitri
Devi's work as like, I can fucking get a shitload
of kids interested in Nazism by pushing this stuff back
out there. Oh okay, and he's fucking right, yeah now,
(44:31):
yeah yeah. Another important architect of this whole thing, and
we're not going to get into enough, but I will
do an episode on in the future is a Chilean
Nazi named Miguel Serrano. And it's from Miguel that we
actually get the term esoteric hitlersm Serano and Devi seem
to have reached essentially the same conclusion about Hitler as
(44:51):
an avatar of Vishnu through slightly different intellectual roots. Miguel
was a student of Young and a mythrist which we
just don't have enough time to get into, and a
member of the day once again, the Theosophical Society. He
was also an early Avid Western practitioner of yoga. Miguel
corresponded with dev during her lifetime. Before he died in
(45:14):
two thousand and nine. He gave interviews to Nazi magazines
with names like Black Sun, where he said this about
Savitri Devi. Quote, Savitri Devi is the greatest warrior after
Adolf Hitler, Rudolph Hess and Joseph Gebels. Moreover, she was
the first to discover the ancient and spiritual power behind Hitlerism.
She envisioned a new religion and inaugurated a sanctuary for
(45:34):
Hitler in India. She was, as I myself am anti Christian.
She initiated completely on her own all that I have
developed up until now. It is not mere coincidence that
the Spanish Catholics published an attack against Savitri Devi, Otto
Ron and me. It was very late in her life
when we started to write each other. We just missed
each other in Europe by one week. I arrived a
few days after her death. I think that Savitri Devi
(45:56):
will be the greatest sister of all the priests of
esoteric hitlersmasts of Wotan.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
And he's like wearing a male feminist T shirt while
he does this. He's like, I don't hate women. I
like this.
Speaker 3 (46:07):
I like the worst woman I've ever heard of love.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
He would not have worn him, I will say that much.
But you're getting the spirit of the guy, right, Yeah,
he's a real gigantic piece of shit. We're not getting
into it up, but he gives her credit as like
the real motive force behind the religion that Hitlerism becomes,
even though he's also like kind of independently coming to
a lot of the same conclusions and even earlier in
(46:31):
some cases. Like she's the popularizer in a lot of way.
She has a big role in that. And yeah, he's
we'll talk about him more later today. Savitri Devi's fingerprints
can be found all over the radical and murderous chunks
of the fascist right. The Fair Creek Division an accelerationist
neo Nazi organization that's a very similar to Adam Woffen Division,
(46:54):
similar enough to talk about for the purposes of this podcast.
Both of them seek to bring about the isolent destruction
of the current world order through to stabilizing attacks. The
Fair Creek Division directly cites dev as an inspiration. The
group's gab bio includes this dev quote, creation and destruction
are one to the eyes of one who can see beauty.
(47:15):
Savitri's beliefs went on to have a big influence on
Adam Waffen too and the members of the base who
weren't FBI agents, anti fascists or journalists, which is basically
those seven guys who got arrested.
Speaker 3 (47:26):
That's familiar.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Yeah, yeah, in these groups like the Base, that we
can see some hint of what makes Savitri dev so dangerous.
The leader of the Michigan Cell of Adam Waffen Division,
who was docked a few days before I wrote this episode,
reached his position in charge of the Michigan Cell when
he was fifteen years old. The three members of the
(47:49):
Base who were arrested in Georgia in the process of
trying to spark a race war were ages nineteen, twenty one,
and twenty five, respectively. These acceleration esoteric Hitlerists tend to
be young, and there is disagreement on the average age
at which people enter cults, but the work of doctor
John G. Clark, a psych professor at Harvard who surveyed
(48:10):
five hundred current and former cult members, suggests an average
age of nineteen and a half for new cult members.
He also points out that most new cult members are male.
This is because young men are particularly vulnerable to being
enraptured by ideologies that offer them a sense of purpose
and belonging. It's one of the reasons the same age
group is the ideal recruitment population for soldiers, but esoteric
(48:32):
hitlersm doesn't just suck these kids in because they're young.
And to explain this new part, I'm going to have
to talk a little bit about techism, and I am
very sorry.
Speaker 4 (48:42):
No, do.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
We absolutely, absolutely, yeah, we.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Really Dochism that is a joking parody of religion invented
by the shit posters four chan and eight chan during
gamer Gate. It's very dumb and talking about it makes
me feel very silly. But the short of it is
keechism started out, and for probably most people still is
a dumb gag and a way for them to make
fun of members of minority groups by pretending to be
(49:09):
members of a victimized religion because they think that's funny.
The whole thing focuses around shit posting and spreading memes.
But as the Trump campaign ramped up and this weird
internet movement started to have an impact on the real world, some,
particularly unhinged Anon, started to take keechism more seriously, while
others just thought the joke kept getting funnier and spread
it around. For that reason, Lawrence Murray, a writer for
(49:32):
the fascist podcast The Right Stuff, was probably the first
person to purposefully meld keechism with Savitri Devi's philosophy into
something he called esoteric keechism. He started shitting out memes
that replaced Hitler with Pepe as an avatar of Vishnu,
stuff like that It's very dumb. When interviewed, Murray claims
he was only half joking with the whole idea, but
(49:54):
like any joke of the sort on the Internet, it
spread like wildfire, and a certain chunk of the people
who saw it took it seriously, which led them to
the work of more serious fascist thinkers, people like Savitri Devi,
and led some of them into accelerationist groups like Adam
Woffen and the Bass. It is not a coincidence that
andders Brevic, the Utoya, Norway shooter who massacred dozens of
(50:16):
children at a left wing summer camp, directly praised Hindu
nationalism in his manifesto. It is also not a total
coincidence that both anders Brevik and Brenton Tarrant, the christ shooter,
claimed to be Knights Templar, members of a Christian order
fighting against Muslims, basically, and it is not a coincidence
that the Urban Dictionary page for Keekism, written by a
(50:38):
gamer gator, describes it as a red pilled ideology originating
from the true Knights templar. And again, all of this
is joking. All of this is not joking. It's both
at once. It's the contradiction of modern fucking yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
Well that's yeah. The greatest trick the Devil ever played
was irony poisoning, because you just can't.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
Yeah, you can't argue with that. And yeah, some people
will say, and it's possible. There is are some central
figures behind this spread of syncretism, like sinister individuals who
have like kind of put all this together purposefully, or
at least put pieces of it together purposefully.
Speaker 3 (51:17):
Yea.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
But I tend to be of the belief that most,
if not all, of it is amorphous. In Acephalis, it
happened without a head, without much intention on its own.
There may have been bits of intention here and there,
like esoteric techism, but a lot of it just happened
because of the sort of structure Savitri Devi built. It's
just kind of the natural result of the amorphous and
(51:39):
sticky nature of the faith that she created. If Hindu
mythology and ancient Egyptian history can be folded in with
Adolf Hitler and the Arian myth. Why can't Cechism wind
up in there too? Why can't the Knights Templar fit
in there too? All these weird little subcultures you've got,
Norse mythology, chan culture, gamer culture, new age, spiritualism, environmentalism,
even veganism. All these things appeal heavily to a lot
(52:03):
of young people. And the more little bridges that you
can build between these different communities and actual extermination is
Nazi beliefs, the more young men will kind of accidentally
fall in and get caught in this net. It's like
a tunnel spider's web. And at the end, the great
innovations have each read, every brought like that's that's the
innovation she brought to Nazism. She took what was a
(52:25):
dead political system that couldn't spread outside of Germany, not really,
and turned it into a living, syncretic religion, something with vitality,
something capable of mutating and absorbing and staying relevant, and
something capable of inspiring young men to commit murder. And
the memory of Adolf Hitler nearly a century after his.
Speaker 3 (52:44):
Death, Could you give me that word one more time.
Speaker 1 (52:46):
Of this syncretism.
Speaker 2 (52:48):
Syncretism, Yeah, I mean it's and if you are able to,
you know, find a way to get a group of
people who are looking for something to believe in, who
are maybe a little bit okay, you know what, You're right?
Speaker 3 (53:02):
I was, but yeah, just like finding a.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
Group of vulnerable, vulnerable people ideologically that need something to
believe in and put a delicious chocolate coating on the
outside of it.
Speaker 3 (53:16):
It seems to it works. It works.
Speaker 1 (53:22):
How do you feel about Savitri? You a fan? You
gotta check out her books.
Speaker 3 (53:26):
I can't say I'm a fan she. I don't think
that we would.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
I don't think we would have been friends in junior
high and I don't think we would have been friends now.
I yeah, no, I mean I truly. And it is
interesting that we don't talk about her. I had no
idea this person existed.
Speaker 1 (53:45):
I why do you think that is? There's a degree
to there's a degree to which I think a lot
of people who know about her and are like researchers
didn't really want to because there's this worry about making
a bigger deal of it than it is. Sure, it's
kind of like I didn't really write about eight Chan
much until the christ Churt shooting, when it was like, okay,
well now we got to the base. Now it's gotten
(54:07):
to those points, like all right, we got to fucking
talk about Savitri dev Debi and esoteric hitlersm Like, we
got to get some of this out there. I do
think it's also just like not super well known. I
think she was seen like really, to be entirely honest,
I think most of her efforts would have looked like
a failure to most observers. Observers up until maybe at
(54:29):
the earliest decade ago. Okay, you know, people who were
really aware of what was going on would have known earlier,
but most people, even pretty well informed people, would have
been like, well, this is kind of a dead end
and just something to like make fun of up until
we start to the internet. Really is what provides this
with the last ingredient it needs to take on.
Speaker 2 (54:50):
Oh yeah, she like pioneered the red pill mentality, like
it's yeah, yeah, she was a.
Speaker 1 (54:55):
Big part of that. Yeah, and we're not like Julius
Evola is a big part of this. Who Steve Bannon
fucking loves Let's me not let me.
Speaker 2 (55:02):
Not take any credit from any of the Red pil Pioneers.
Speaker 3 (55:06):
Everyone deserves to take up space.
Speaker 1 (55:09):
We'll get them all. We'll get them all on the show.
Speaker 3 (55:11):
We will, we will. They deserve it. Mm hmm, well
serve it well, Robert as usual. This was absolutely horrifying
and you've ruined my day. Thank you?
Speaker 1 (55:22):
Good? Yeah, that's the goal.
Speaker 3 (55:23):
Okay, good, And.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
I've got I've got some pluggables, like you can listen
to my podcast, My Year in Mensa. It's online now,
there's only four episodes. It's real quick. I'm on Twitter
at Jamie Loftus help Instagram at Jamie car Superstar on
tour for the next month or so. Jamie Loftus is
innocent dot com. And that's what I have to say.
(55:48):
I love when we talk about the warship in the
entire world and at the end you're like, so, what's
your Twitter handle?
Speaker 1 (55:54):
This is Twitter? If you really want to learn more
about esotery, Hitler is follow Sophie's Twitter. Why underscore, Sophie underscore?
Why Rob absolutely violent?
Speaker 3 (56:10):
Cannot shut make me fire you no? You know, Hitler,
you know what?
Speaker 2 (56:17):
Have been on Twitter for less than forty eight hours
already getting accused of crimes. Robert's gonna be canceled by
the time this came out because he blew his nose
on the mic no less than four times hours.
Speaker 1 (56:31):
I am, I am ill, You're ill.
Speaker 2 (56:34):
I know, but you know, but I mean now you're
just now you're just bragging about it.
Speaker 3 (56:40):
Follow our podcast at Bessard's pod on Instagram.
Speaker 1 (56:44):
Don't tell me what to do, so oh sorry, listeners,
what to do.
Speaker 3 (56:49):
For get it together?
Speaker 1 (56:51):
I know I didn't sleep last night and the.
Speaker 3 (56:54):
Episodes nobody I know we've had the Nazism sleep last night?
That does that excuse the nose blowing? My friend having
trouble sleeping? Does it excuse the nose blowing? No?
Speaker 1 (57:09):
No, No, Robert, Sophie, Robert, that's going to be okay.
It is not.
Speaker 3 (57:17):
We're always getting mad. And the episode my friend and
go take a nap.
Speaker 1 (57:20):
Yeah, the episode is over. Yay, Go hug a cat
or dog? Cats? Can you stop Nazis cat and encourage
the angriest person you know to write fan fiction.
Speaker 3 (57:34):
That's truly the greatest service you can do.
Speaker 1 (57:35):
Both of those things are critical.
Speaker 2 (57:38):
All right, Episode's over, Bye bye,
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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