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Savitri Devi, Mystical Fascist

Discussion in 'WWII General' started by GRW, Oct 29, 2017.

  1. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Story takes a while to get going, but it's an interesting read-
    "Savitri Devi, a mystical admirer of Hitler and a cat-loving devotee of the Aryan myth, seemed destined to fade into obscurity after her death 25 years ago. But thanks to the rise of the extreme right, her name and her image now crop up online more and more, writes Maria Margaronis.
    In 2012, browsing the website of Greece's Golden Dawn party for an article I was writing, I stumbled on a picture of a woman in a blue silk sari gazing at a bust of Hitler against a blazing sunset sky.
    What was this apparently Hindu woman doing on the site of an openly racist party devoted to expelling all foreigners from Greece? I filed her as a curiosity at the back of my mind, until the rising tide of extreme-right politics in Europe and America threw up the name "Savitri Devi" once again.
    It isn't hard these days to find discussions of Savitri Devi's books on neo-Nazi web forums, especially The Lightning and the Sun, which expounds the theory that Hitler was an avatar - an incarnation - of the Hindu god Vishnu, and Gold in the Furnace, which urges true believers to trust that National Socialism will rise again. The American extreme-right website Counter-Currents hosts an extensive online archive of her life and work.
    Her views are reaching a wider public audience, too, thanks to American alt-right leaders such as Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon, former Trump chief strategist and chair of Breitbart News, who have taken up her account of history as a cyclical battle between good and evil — a theory she shared with other 20th Century mystical fascists.
    Dark metal bands and American right-wing radio stations also roar about the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of Hindu mythology, which Savitri Devi believed that Hitler was once destined to bring to an end.
    Who was Savitri Devi, and why are her ideas being resurrected now? Despite the sari and the name she was a European, born Maximiani Portas to an English mother and Greek-Italian father in Lyon in 1905.
    From an early age, she despised all forms of egalitarianism. "A beautiful girl is not equal to an ugly girl," she told an interviewer sent by the Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel in 1978.
    Swept up by Greek nationalism, she arrived in Athens in 1923 at the same time as thousands of refugees displaced after Greece's disastrous military campaign in Asia Minor at the end of World War One.
    She blamed the Western allies for Greece's humiliation, and for what she saw as the unjustly punitive terms imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. In Savitri's mind, Greece and Germany were both victims, denied the legitimate aspiration of uniting all their people in one territory. That view, combined with a passionate anti-Semitism which she claimed she learned from the Bible, led her to identify herself early on as a National Socialist.
    Hitler was Germany's champion but, she said, his desire to eradicate Europe's Jews and restore the "Aryan race" to its rightful position of power made him her "Fuhrer" too.
    In common with anti-Semitic thinkers since the 18th century, Savitri blamed Judeo-Christianity for destroying the glory that was Greece and the Aryans' mythical ancient utopia. In the early 1930s she sailed for India in search of a living version of Europe's pagan past, convinced that the caste system, by forbidding intermarriage, had preserved pure Aryans there. (Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who visited India in the 1970s, shared her misconception.)
    So unusual was the sight of a European woman travelling fourth class by train that she was placed under surveillance by the British colonial authorities. But Savitri had little to do with the British in India until World War Two, when she passed information she gleaned from them to the Japanese. She learned Indian languages, married a Brahmin (whom she believed to be an Aryan like herself), and forged an elaborate synthesis of Nazism and Hindu myth, in which Hitler was a "man against time" destined to bring about the end of the Kali Yuga and usher in a new golden age of Aryan supremacy."
    The mystical fascist who admired Hitler, beloved of the alt-right
     
  2. JJWilson

    JJWilson Well-Known Member

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    Great post Gordon, I have never heard of this deranged lady before, quite an interesting/disturbing life and mindset indeed..........
     

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