THE FURRED REICH
SD TUCKER explores the strange life of Savitri Devi, the noted feminazi and ultimate catlady who tried to make a religion out of Nazism and a god of the Führer, and finds that she has since become something of a cult political figure herself.
SD TUCKER explores the strange life of Savitri Devi, the noted feminazi and ultimate cat-lady who tried to make a religion out of Nazism and a god of the Führer, and finds that she has since become something of a cult political figure herself.
T
he humorist Alan Coren was once asked to suggest a title for his new book. He chose to call it Golfing for Cats and proposed a large swastika be placed on the cover, on the grounds that, even though his text had nothing whatsoever to do with any of these topics, books about cats, Nazis or golf always sold well. Try telling that to
Savitri Devi, author of the 1965 fable LongWhiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess: Or, the True Story of a “Most Objectionable Nazi”
and Half-a-Dozen Cats, which, in spite of its subject matter, did not sell as well as Coren might have anticipated. Perhaps this was because the messages it contained were deemed unsuitable for the children at whom the book was apparently aimed: that the Nazis were right, that cats were better than humans, and that one of Hitler’s main waraims was to improve living conditions for animals across occupied Europe.
The book’s chief character, the ‘TwoLegged Goddess’ and ‘Most Objectionable Nazi’ of the title, was named Heliodora, meaning ‘Gift of the Sun’, a thinly disguised version of Devi herself, whose name meant ‘Sun-Ray Goddess’ in Sanskrit. However, due to the unjustifiable persecution of loyal Nazis in the post-WWII world, Devi felt it necessary to change the name of “every person and every animal in this story”, for “obvious reasons”; she didn’t want them to end up hanging from Allied nooses, as at Nuremberg, or being drowned in a canal. 1 The book opens with a charming image of a dozen cats gathered around Heliodora in her sparsely furnished room in India, where she sits cross-legged on a mat before a blown-up photograph of Adolf Hitler doing what he does best – being kind to animals. Adolf is sweetly feeding a baby deer, thus proving him “the Friend of Creatures and exponent of everlasting Wisdom”. So wise is the Führer that Heliodora worships Him as a god: “Fresh pink lotuses lay in a round, flat, painted earthen vessel at the foot of the picture, and three sticks of incense were burning before it, fixed in holes at the top of a brass burner, with the shape of the sacred sign ‘Aum’.” 2 As the real-life Devi also sanctified photos of Hitler in this way, 3 we can see how the story was based on actual facts – or the facts as Devi saw them.
PUSS IN JACKBOOTS
Surprisingly, Devi expects her infant readers to have a basic grasp of the theory of Platonic Forms, acclaiming what she sees as “the intangible Essence of Catdom” shining present in every cat she meets. Each cat “expresses more faithfully the Self of his species” or “divine collective Soul” of Catdom than most woefully imperfect humans ever could in relation to the Ideal Soul of their own species – that of the pure Aryan race. 4 The classic example was the English, who had rejected Germany’s hand of friendship and fought their fellow Aryans instead. For this, Heliodora decides the entire English race must be exterminated – until she is told otherwise by a cat. Visiting London post-1945, Heliodora enters into a psychic mind-meld with a pet cat called Sandy, who restores her “sincere consciousness of the oneness of the Nordic race, in spite of all the horrors of recent fratricidal war”. Like many animals in children’s books, Sandy can talk; unlike most such animals, what Sandy wants to talk about most is the infamy of the Jews: “Prrr, prrr, prrr… One day [the English] shall wake up from their delusion, turn against their bad shepherds [the Jews], and help the people of their own blood to build up a new Europe… in which we creatures will all be happy… for they are good people at heart, good people like Aryans generally are, taken as a whole. Prrr, prrr, prrr… The proof of it is that they have taken such good care of me! Prrrrrrrr…” This argument proves persuasive to Heliodora (“‘O Cat, you are right,’ agreed at last the tough old racialist”). The English, as a nation of petlovers, should be spared genocide when, some happy day, the Third Reich rises again. 5 Given that the book purports to be based on a true story, you can make of this episode what you will.
Again, unusually for a children’s book – if it really is one – Devi’s yarn features a graphic description of cat sex. Encountering a fine young female feline in a Calcutta slum, a male cat called LongWhiskers “overcame her faked resistance and possessed her” in order to “fulfil the purpose which the Divine Cat had assigned to them from all eternity… [to] carry Catdom a generation further [and] secure its everlastingness” – much as the Nazis planned to do with the Aryan race. Apparently, this union was quite a pussytrembler: “Their individualities ceased for a while to exist, and in him, the Eternal He-Cat, Creator and Lord of Everything, and in her the co-eternal, sphinx-like, dark Feline Mother, Lady of All Life, once more mingled their opposite polarities and took consciousness of their double Godhead, as they had been doing for millions and millions of years. And once more the divine spark – the Creative Lightning – flashed through their furry bodies, and the daily miracle took place: there was life in the
All cats are fleshly embodiments of the Ideal Platonic Cat-Soul
female’s womb.” 6 This is not simply an attempt at writing Mills & Boon for animallovers; it contains important philosophical points. As the individual kittens sired via Long-Whiskers’ lightning-infused sperm are direct replicas of “the Eternal He-Cat”, this means all cats are merely temporary, fleshly embodiments of the Ideal Platonic Cat-Soul – including Long-Whiskers himself, who is later reincarnated in Sandy’s body in London. As perfectly embodied aspects of the same shared noble soul, all cats are reincarnated time and again, just like certain ultra-perfect Germans, who are likewise direct embodiments of the Ideal Platonic Aryan Soul – most notably Adolf Hitler.
THE CAT CAME BACK (REPEATEDLY)
Devi’s tale continues with a unique account of an out-of-body experience written from the perspective of a dying cat, namely Sandy, who is then reborn in Iran, where he is flattened by a car. The book ends with Heliodora gazing wistfully into the night sky and realising that cats are not only embodiments of the Ideal Cat-Soul, but also, on a higher level, of the impersonal Godhead which suffuses the entire Universe – as is Hitler. Hitler and cats, as flawless expressions of their respective Platonic archetypes, are really one and the same thing, God Himself; which must explain all those cats who look like Hitler on the Internet. “Thou shinest in them: Thou art
they!” prays Heliodora to the stars. When she worships the photo of Adolf feeding a deer, Heliodora is really worshipping God in human form and also, simultaneously, the life-giving Sun. The Sun-like Hitler, not Jesus, is the true Light of the World, through which the Aryan Godhead shines, and the Godhead can never die. Just as Sandy will always return from beyond the pet cemetery, so will the Divine Führer who was not simply a fascist dictator but “the messenger of the Soul of Starry Space”. In religious terms, Adolf had an esoteric (hidden) as well as an exoteric (surface) nature, as did Nazism itself. 7 As Devi once argued: “National Socialism will rise again
because it is true to Cosmic Reality, and because that which is true does not pass.” 8
Heliodora is convinced that white Nordic folk, being more in touch with Nature and God, would never mistreat animals. As proof, she cites the case of “the hero, Horst Wessel”, the ‘martyred’ Nazi stormtrooper, who “was a great cat-lover”, as had been proven to Heliodora when she met his aunt one day and was shown a photo of him surrounded by cute kittens. Furthermore, she had been out for coffee with one of the Brownshirt thugs responsible for
Kristallnacht, who assured her “quite emphatically” that, whilst they might have beaten up lots of Jews and destroyed their property on the dismal night in question, they had “never molested any cats, dogs or
other beasts just because they happened to belong to Jews”. 9 Yes, there was a real affinity between Nazis and cats of all kinds; “the dream-like vision” of the MasterRace which Hitler wanted the Germans to become stood in direct parallel to the ultimate cat-lords of the animal kingdom, “those four-legged kings of the jungle” the lions, who were “as beautiful on their level” as blonde, blue-eyed Nazi supermen of the future were on theirs. As this was the case, the Nazis had commendably banned vivisection upon animals in Germany… and replaced it with live medical experiments on people instead. 10 Heliodora genuinely thinks this is one of the finest achievements of Nazism and fantasises that, when Hitler returns, she will be placed in charge of a special concentration camp “of her dreams”, in which “two-legged mammals… who believe that ‘man’ is everything and other creatures nothing” will be eliminated. 11 Heliodora believes in animal rights, but not human ones. The post-war world is a topsy-turvy one in which democracy rules over dictatorship, Nazis are called criminals instead of heroes, and abattoirs are full of animals, not people. This was a true Dark Age – that of kali yuga.
HEIL HINDU HITLER!
Who was this mad old cat lady? Born Maximiani Portas in 1905 to an English mother and a French father of Greek-Italian ancestry, she travelled to India in 1932, where the avowed pagan identified closely with Hinduism and changed her name to Savitri Devi. This may seem surprising, but in the lunatic Nazi theorising of the day it was presumed the Aryan race might well have originated in India, an early home of the swastika ‘sun-wheel’ symbol (see
FT175:30-39, 196:32-39). The Indian castesystem also held appeal for those who, like Devi, saw in it parallels with restrictive Nazi racial laws. A National Socialist from 1929 onwards, Devi spied for Japan during World War II, becoming involved with the nationalist Hindutva movement, which argued that India was an inherently Hindu country in which colonialists, Christians and Muslims had no true place, as elaborated in her 1936 book A Warning to the Hindus. Today, the Hindutva movement is actually in power in the shape of PM Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP Party, showing that not all the political causes Devi adopted were lost ones.
One of the Hindu nationalists Devi met was Srimat Swami Satyananda, who was also interested in Hitler due to his adoption of the swastika and championing of Aryanism. Satyananda told Devi of his theory that Hitler was really an incarnation, or avatar, of the Hindu god Vishnu, descended to Earth to restore order to a chaotic world. Under such influences, throughout WWII Devi developed a demented personal philosophy derived from the old Hindu idea of the Cycle of the Ages, with the aim of proving that Nazism was not really a political (exoteric) movement, but a secret (esoteric) religious one. According to Hinduism, history does not progress in a straight line but an eternally-repeating cycle like that of the seasons. We once enjoyed a perfect spring or summer-like Golden Age, but by the time of WWII had entered into a wintry Dark Age termed the kali yuga, an age of inversion in which all true values were reversed – as with live medical experiments taking place on cats, not humans. “Any healthy cat,” Devi once argued, was worth much more than a “degenerate human bastard”, but kali yuga forces had obscured this truth. 12 Devi saw tell-tale signs of kali
yuga in everything from the disgraceful proliferation of hospitals, which only served to keep worthless sick folk alive, to the truly shocking sight of black men
History does not progress in a line but an eternally repeating cycle
driving motorcars. 13 On a wider level, Jews controlled the world, not Aryans, commerce and materialism ruled, not religion and spirituality, and the races, instead of remaining pure, were becoming ever more mixed and diluted.
BRING ME SUNSHINE
Reading up on Traditionalist writers like René Guénon and Julius Evola (see Gary Lachman, “Musolini’s Mystic”, FT191:4045), 14 who also spoke of the need to combat
kali yuga, by the time of Nazi defeat Devi had developed the notion there were three types of notable men in existence. ‘Men In Time’ were great and ruthless leaders like Genghis Khan, who raped, killed and plundered for their own material gain within a materialist kali yuga. Such figures possessed the power of lightning, letting them swiftly conquer nations like human thunderbolts. ‘Men Above Time’ were otherworldly sages who transcended the
kali yuga via spiritual means like occultism and meditation. They possessed the power of the Sun, whose light enabled them to see through the shoddy stage-set of this world and perceive the eternal archetypes (like that of Perfect Catdom) which lay behind it. ‘Men Against Time’ possessed powers of both Sun and lightning, and tried to conquer the world in the name of dispelling the kali yuga and bringing a return to cosmic springtime, allowing the rebirth of a new Golden Age. Men Against Time were incarnations of Vishnu, and the greatest so far had been his ninth avatar, Adolf Hitler, who enjoyed powers both of exoteric lightning, with his doctrine of blitzkrieg or ‘lightning warfare’, and of esoteric Sun, as with his swastika sunwheel emblem (perhaps his nine lives up to this point also signified his innate affinity with cats). Hitler may have been beaten in 1945 but, argued Devi, his defeat was really victory in disguise. Hitler had sacrificed his own life and deliberately lost his brave war against the Allies in the material world only in order to push it into a state of exceptional crisis, like undermining a bridge so it would soon collapse. In the invisible world, Hitler had already won, simply awaiting rebirth as the final, tenth incarnation of Vishnu, a figure known as ‘Kalki the Destructor’ who would play a role in history rather akin to that of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, another potentially worldshattering avatar with very white skin. In her 1958 text The Lightning and the
Sun, Devi argued that destruction by / Hitler Reborn was a far greater prospect for humanity than continued rule by the victorious forces of Jew-controlled pseudo-democratic capitalism because, in their crazed quest for money, our rootless plutocratic rulers would eventually ruin the entire planet through industrialisation and overpopulation until no life whatsoever could be supported on it, whereas Kalki/ Hitler would just kill billions of people and then leave an unpolluted Earth to be inhabited by a few Nazi Aryan supermen, living in harmony with lots and lots of lovely cats and other animals. You’ve got to be cruel to be kind – and Hitler was the kindest man in history. For Devi, his only flaw lay in his not having committed “more substantial violences, more complete exterminations”. Given that, at Hitler’s birth, the stars had formed “a definite pattern marking the return to Earth of Him who comes back”, we might have expected more from this avatar. But then, Hitler was actually a uniting force; Vishnu’s Aryan Race-Soul chose to be reborn in Braunau-am-Inn on the Austrian border so he could reunite the nation with its nearby Fatherland. However, Hitler initially wished to do this peacefully and, contrary to popular belief, did his best to prevent WWII, not start it. “Nobody wanted peace more than Adolf Hitler,” said Devi, not from any lily-livered “humanitarian prejudices”, but due to his desire to restore balance to the Universe. Hitler’s original purity of intention could be seen in his reputed vegetarianism and in the way that, “as a young man, nay, a very attractive one”, he refused all offers of sex, preferring to direct “the sacred flame of Life” within his sun-and-lightning-infused testicles into sacred avenues instead. But then the Jews and English had declared war on him, and ruined everything. And, if you think this all happened the other way around, then that is because you too have been corrupted by the inverted forces of kali yuga into seeing history upside-down. 15
But if the Divine Adolf is supposed to return… where is he? He did not reappear within Savitri Devi’s lifetime. In 1948, Devi was imprisoned in Germany for distributing 6,000 handbills detailing Hitler’s impending reappearance: “Our Führer is alive, and will soon come back, with power unheard of.
Bestiality-related pregnancies led to a subsequent loss of electronic powers
Resist our persecutors! Hope and wait. Heil Hitler!” But still He did not come. However, jail allowed Devi to act as a martyr, saying prayers to Shiva whilst holding a locket containing Hitler’s image to her breast, and forming close relationships (allegedly of a lesbian nature) with imprisoned female concentration-camp wardens. 16 The 1950s and 1960s saw her mixing with various other Hitler-worshippers, before in 1970 she went to live with Nazi sympathiser Françoise Dior, niece of the fashionista, from whose home she was allegedly later expelled due to her refusal to take a bath. From here Devi returned to India; here she lived once more amongst cats, who, being better than humans, clearly didn’t mind the smell as much. Her books were initially underground
samizdat- type arrangements, but in the late 1960s extracts appeared in the US neo-Nazi magazine National Socialist World, to much fringe acclaim, and when she died in 1982 her ashes were stored in the ‘Valhalla’ of the neo-Nazi ‘New Order’ organisation in Wisconsin, reputedly next to those of former American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, who himself believed he had undergone certain mystical Nazi-related experiences, meeting with Hitler in his dreams. However, Devi’s ashes have since imitated the life-cycle of the phoenix, and, anticipating the return of her beloved GodFührer, the Nazi priestess has now made a startling political comeback herself...
OUR FRIENDS ELECTRIC
In 1905 a book called Theo-Zoology was published by the Austrian racial theorist Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (see FT218:32-39). Lanz’s idea was that Aryans had once been gods on Earth who were partially electronic in nature and had possessed anti-gravity powers, psychic abilities, three eyes, and the capacity to emit beams of light and fire from their bodies. Sadly, the female descendents of this early Aryan super-race also possessed dirty minds, which they could only satisfy by obsessively mating with then-extant races of humanoid reptiles with big bones in their penises, named ‘dinosaur-hominids’, and bands of well-hung midget half-monkeys termed ‘love-pygmies’. Subsequent bestialityrelated pregnancies led to profound racial degeneration and loss of electronic powers, with the weakened Aryan race “today dying the sodomistic death” all across Europe. The historic “quite strange preference” of Aryan females for such “so-called ‘interesting men’” had to be terminated, argued Lanz, otherwise we would “make the entire world into a big brothel in which everything revolves around penises and pussies”; which would be “silly”. The solution was to ban white women from sleeping with any “pleasureapes” and “sodomistic monsters” – by which Lanz meant Jews, Slavs, and other modern products of ancient bestiality – and pass laws allowing them only to mate with their fellow Aryans. Furthermore, the remaining monkey-men “must be exterminated in a gentle way” via castration and sterilisation; although Lanz later changed his mind, arguing they should be exploited as slavelabour, incinerated, or resettled en masse on Madagascar. Via a programme of selective breeding, in which white German women were locked in convents and forced to bear multiple children to the noblest Aryan menfolk, the German people would gradually recapture their ancient godly nature, siring a breed of holy electronic knights intended to conquer the world. “We were electric, we will be electric!” was Lanz’s unlikely promise. 17 Lanz and his followers were responding to pressing demographic trends of the time, fearing ethnic Germans like themselves were at imminent risk of being subsumed by teeming animalistic üntermenschen within the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire. This was how Adolf Hitler had written about the multi-ethnic Vienna of his youth: “I found the racial conglomeration of the Imperial capital disgusting, this whole medley of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs and Croats… The city seemed the very embodiment of racial infamy.” Vienna had traditionally been dominated by ethnic Germans, but between 1860 and 1900 the city’s population increased threefold, substantially due to immigration. In talking about dinosaurs and monkeys shagging humans, Lanz was drawing a bizarre occult parallel with what he saw as the German race being swallowed into racial chaos via miscegenation. Under such specific historical circumstances, what should have been an exceedingly fringe idea ended up being read about by thousands of people who shared such basic racial worries – including, allegedly, Hitler himself, a supposed Lanz reader. In the later Third Reich, racial ‘sub-humans’ really were incinerated and enslaved, marriage-laws passed to ensure the ‘purity of the race’, and lebensborn
programmes akin to Lanz’s notion of sexconvents initiated. Madagascar was even considered as a potential location for resettling German Jews. The Nazis did not believe in love-apes themselves, but it has been plausibly argued that cults like Lanz’s helped lay the ground in preparing Germans for the racial pseudo-science that eventually led to Auschwitz. 18
The contemporary relevance of all this was spotted by the scholar of occult Nazism Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in his 2002 book Black Sun, in which he argued that “Multicultural [Western] societies face a similar challenge today… the United States and most European nations are facing a demographic shift against their historic native stocks. The resulting issue of white identity recapitulates the dilemma of Austrian Germans fearing a loss of influence in the old Habsburg Empire.” It was Goodrick-Clarke’s contention that, as a result, we would soon be seeing an upsurge in the number of neo-Nazis who used floridly delusional occult symbolism as a means of protesting against mass immigration and rampant liberal overreach, just as Lanz did. According to Goodrick-Clarke: “We cannot know what the future holds for Western multicultural societies, but the experiment did not fare well in Austria-Hungary… From the retrospective viewpoint of… [future decades] … Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism may be documented as early symptoms of major divisive changes in our present-day Western democracies.” 19 Given certain recent events, it appears Goodrick-Clarke was correct.
THERE WON’T ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND
Already described by Goodrick-Clarke in 2002 as “an Evita-figure for opponents of multi-racial democracy”, 20 Savitri Devi’s cult is now spreading rapidly across the online world, particularly in terms of her teaching that the kali yuga, as an age of inversion, was one in which ‘democracy’ was truly a disguised dictatorship of liberal, Jewcontrolled internationalist elites, enabling traditionally Aryan nations to be flooded with inferior foreigners, just as, in Hitler’s eyes, the Vienna of his youth had been. Most notably, Devi’s rhetoric has seen her adopted as a figurehead by the American alt-right, whose staunchly anti-immigration views mirror her own. This is how Devi once described the likely future fate of England, which foolishly “chose to listen to her Jewish misleaders” in fighting Germany instead of joining it: “She shall die – not the glorious death on the battlefield, but the slow, nauseating death through bloodmixture and all manner of vice. Within less than 300 years to come – unless there be a miracle [i.e. Hitler’s return] – there shall be no more England. My [English] mother’s compatriots… will have given way before teeming millions of mongrels (a hotch-potch of Jamaicans, Africans, Pakistanis, Jews and degenerate Englishwomen) with nothing in common with their forefathers… The few remaining pure-blooded English Aryans… [will be] foreigners in the land of their ancestors.” 21 Or, in other words, “Jews are going to replace us”. Sound familiar?
Online, Devi’s philosophy has been turned into a parodic fake religion dubbed ‘Esoteric Kekism’ (‘KEK’ being an alternate form of ‘LOL’) by the alt-right, in which humorous memes about Devi, Hitler and Vishnu are spread, hoping to rid Nazism of its taboo status, making esoteric fascism look cool and funny. Meanwhile, the US alt-right’s offline leader, Richard Spencer, has made headlines for calling the white race “Children of the Sun”, a concept apparently gleaned directly from Devi and Evola. America, he has said, truly belongs to these superior white Sun-children, but it has been stolen from them by other races, with the election of Donald Trump the first step in taking it back. The lying fake-news media pundits who had criticised Trump during his election campaign were, Spencer has implied, nothing but “soulless golem” – monsters created by Jews. 22 When you see the alt-right chanting “Jews will not replace us!” in reference to an imaginary Israelite plan to substitute the white European and American population with blacks and Muslims, you can see GoodrickClarke’s warnings coming true before your eyes; Europe is indeed undergoing a massive demographic sea-change, but it has nothing to do with the Jews, many of whom are now actually fleeing countries like France due to rising anti-Semitism, much of which has been blindly imported from abroad. So, just as Lanz’s mad ideas about dino-sex anticipated widespread fears about the eclipsing of traditional native populations by immigrants years before these very same worries were expressed in more comprehensible terms by the Nazis,
Europe is a postmodern hologram created by liberal post-humans
so Savitri Devi’s loony allegations about Jews destroying the white race via kali yuga methods now sound like direct harbingers of the ‘Jews will not replace us’ crowd, even if most who chant such words have never heard of her.
CYCLING DOWNHILL
Another American political figure sometimes linked to Devi is Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former White House Chief Strategist, and the driving force behind Trump’s successful election campaign (although Trump implausibly now denies this). However, I think the link is a bit overblown. Bannon may be a nationalist, but he is no Far Right racist or occultist and has dismissed Richard Spencer as a “freak” and a “goober”. A well-read man who spent over a decade engaged in a comparative study of world religions, he has read his Guénon and Evola and once mentioned the latter briefly in a 2014 speech. But this doesn’t mean he is a fullblown disciple of Devi et al as some have implied. Bannon’s biographer Joshua Green has called him “more synthesist than strict adherent”, ploughing through Traditionalist books and picking out the bits he likes whilst discarding those he doesn’t. He has explicitly rejected Evola’s mystical antiSemitic views on race, for instance, whilst taking note of his ideas about blowing up certain parts of civil society to force social change – “draining the Washington swamp”, as Trump would say. Even so, ‘Bannon the Barbarian’, as he calls himself, certainly thinks we are in the midst of some kali
yuga- like “new Dark Age”, in which true values are being inverted. “We shouldn’t be running a victory-lap every time some sort of traditional value gets undercut,” he has argued. Looking around him, Bannon sees unelected transnationalists usurping elected national governments, thereby thwarting the will of the West’s people and their desire to maintain their customary ways of life.
Bannon is unquestionably a cultural pessimist who foresees some great crisis looming on the West’s horizon, as can be seen in his love for a 1997 book, The Fourth
Turning, in which two amateur historians, William Strauss and Neil Howe, argue that every society goes through an inevitable (non-occult) cycle of growth, flourishing, decay and collapse, akin to the cycle of the seasons. Apparently, each full cycle lasts for 80 years, the span of a human life, or ‘sæculum’, and the West, after glorious rebirth in the aftermath of WWII, should now brace itself for the arrival of winter. Reportedly, Bannon views the financial crash of 2008 as being the ‘hinge’ upon which the new winter will turn. Strauss and Howe’s theory is like a version of the Hindu Cycle of Ages on fast-forward, and Howe, like Bannon, has spoken of the need for “creative destruction” to occur in the West, saying that “there has to be a period in which we tear down everything that is no longer functional.” Viewed like this, there is a sense in which President Trump could be viewed as another ‘Man Against Time’, come to rip down the old order of political correctness, rampant globalisation and the overregulation of internal financial markets, hoping to replace it with something new (or, looked at cyclically, with something old which America has since lost). 23 So, you can see there is a loose parallel between Trump and Bannon’s original (now somewhat thwarted) programme for office and Devi’s ideas – but all this really means is that Bannon doesn’t see society as an expression of infinite progress along an endlessly straight line, and that cycles of cultural decline sometimes have to be forcibly reversed by wilfully disruptive figures like The Donald. Clearly, millions of voters agreed.
NO SUCH THING AS SOCIETY
Bannon’s rough counterpart in Russia, Aleksandr Dugin, ‘Putin’s Rasputin’, also seems fixated upon the idea of the West being trapped in the mud of kali yuga (see
FT349:48–51). In a 2014 interview with German publication Der Spiegel, Dugin professed to “love the roots of German culture”, but complained that “they do not exist anymore” within the realm of fallen modernity. Instead, “Germany is today a kind of counter-Germany”, in which all traditional values have been inverted. According to Dugin: “In the liberal postmodernist West… democracy today is understood as the rule of the minority” – that is, of liberal elites. Because the ordinary masses are looked down on by such people, argued Dugin, and their desires treated with contempt, voters would eventually “lean towards populism, socialism or fascism”, as indeed they have since done. Dugin sees excessive Western celebration of diversity as a clear sign of kali yuga, which ordinary people do not want. Rejected by most European intellectuals, Dugin has travelled across the EU speaking to ordinary folk instead – “taxi-drivers, Bavarian farmers, Romanian students, French chambermaids” – few of whom appeared interested in the finer nuances of current identity politics. Dugin professed to “love” Europe, which is why he told his interviewer he was so “frightened” that one day the continent would disappear
completely, perhaps up its own fundament. “I see it dies,” he lamented. 24 Echoing Devi’s concerns, in his book The
Fourth Political Theory Dugin argues that through the excessive worship of selfhood, as expressed via state-enforced ‘cults’ of diversity and human rights, the Europe we see around us is no longer Europe at all, but a metaphorical post-modern hologram created by a race of liberal post-humans, in which reality itself has been deliberately turned upside-down. However: “In the course of the gradual liberation of man from all that which is not himself [i.e. the traditional ‘restrictive’ values of his own people] … one must sooner or later free a man from his own self.” The ultimate result of this ‘anything goes’ attitude will be “the fact of the Apocalypse” in which society, free of all social boundaries, dissolves away into the complete chaos of non-existence – a bleak extension of the theories of Edmund Burke (see FT361:48–51). With excessive freedom and no common roots or values, the human self becomes a balkanised chaos; a shapeshifter like modern liberal man has no inherent form to call his own, existing only as a series of temporary masks with no true face beneath. If endless ‘tolerance’ is now the West’s only true value, then in effect that means we have no real values at all. The central political question of our age, argues Dugin, is really “Hamlet’s eternal question” – ‘To be or not to be?’ At the moment, he implies, the increasingly atomised West has chosen the latter, much as Savitri Devi once predicted. 25
PROGRESSIVE DECLINE
Some of Devi’s modern fans are extremely unpleasant, and others actively nuts. However, it’s obvious that some of her ideas are finding a reflection in mainstream opinion today. If you strip the kali yuga of its esoteric Hindu elements and reduce it simply to a metaphor, namely an ‘Age of Inversion’, then all you have to do is open a newspaper (for maximum effect, I suggest the Daily Mail) to see that in the eyes of many people, traditional moral, social and biological norms are being turned upsidedown in the name of ‘progress’. For critics of this kind of ‘progress’, then, it is not irrational to believe that this is indeed an age of inversion – and you don’t need to be a weird, occult neo-Nazi to hold such views. The cranks who worship Savitri Devi are full of dangerous nonsense, particularly about Jews, but, as implied by Dugin and Bannon, some of their central criticisms of society are likely shared by many millions (perhaps even a majority) of ordinary people in the West. In our massively multicultural cities there will inevitably be some disillusioned folk who start talking about London, Marseilles or Malmö in the way that Hitler and Lanz did about late-Habsburg Vienna. Honest concern about the unprecedented demographic and cultural upheaval which the West is currently undergoing is both legitimate and increasingly common, and it would be tremendously stupid of governments not to pay it heed in a reasonable manner; otherwise, the genuinely extreme views of rabid anti-Semites like Devi, and the less overtly odd Far Right figures of whom she acts as an early-warning sign, may gain even more traction, as forecast by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.
This, apparently, is what progress looks like – in the Dark Age of the kali yuga, we should expect no less.