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The Philosophy of the Swastika
Savitri Devi
A Movement such as National Socialism, destined
to appeal to millions, does not attract every one of its adherents for the
same reasons. That matters little, as long as the Movement is triumphant. Then,
the more the better. Even the fellow who joins the Party for the material
advantages he hopes to get out of it, can be made use of. And his children,
at any rate—provided they be of irreproachable blood—can be trained into
better Nazis than himself. But, those alone who uphold the National
Socialist Idea for the sake of something vital and fundamental—those alone
who found in it the perfect expression of their own life-long philosophy—can
be expected to cling to it under all circumstances whatsoever. I do not say
they are the only ones likely to cling to it. A sense of duty, a chivalrous
feeling of obligation towards their glorious past, a consciousness of
gratitude towards a régime that gave them great privileges as long as it
lasted, can, of course, prompt thousands of others to remain faithful in the
midst of untold hardships. And those thousands are to be praised. Yet, no
allegiance is worth that which is based upon the physical impossibility of
betraying one’s own self. “One cannot kill a Weltanschauung—an
outlook on the universe; a philosophy—by force, but only through the
aggressive impact of another Weltanschauung.”4 These are
the very words of the Founder of National Socialism. And how true they ring
today, after twenty-five years! The real Nazis—those who can (and will)
resist, and defeat, in the end, the coalesced forces of a temporarily
triumphant world—are those to whom not merely the political side of National
Socialism, but the National Socialist conception of man and life is so
natural that no other “Weltanschauung” can possibly appeal to them,
however cleverly advertised it be, by people who pretend to know the art of
advertising in and out.
The National Socialist conception of man and life
is anything but “new.” Its first exponents on this earth were probably the
oldest seers of mankind, and the principles on which it is based are as
ancient as life itself. Only the National Socialist movement is new. Not
merely new, but unique of its kind. It is, in the whole evolution of the
West, the sole systematic attempt to build a state—nay, to organise a
continent—upon the frank acknowledgement of the everlasting laws that rule
the growth of races and the creation of culture; the one rational effort to
put a stop to the decay of a superior race and to the subsequent confusion.
It is the movement “against Time” par excellence—the movement
against the age-old downward trend of history—conscious of the one way out of
the evils and ugliness of our degenerate epoch, back to the joy and glory of
every great beginning, and boldly urging along that way the noblest people of
the West. But precisely in order to appreciate all its
novelty, and all its beauty, one should bear in mind the eternity of the
philosophy that lies behind it; of what I call the philosophy of the
Swastika. This is not the philosophy of any man. It is, in
the clear consciousness of the really great Ones who are capable of feeling
it—from the oldest Aryan lawgivers of Vedic and post-Vedic India, down to
Adolf Hitler today—the wisdom of the Cosmos, the philosophy of the Sun,
Father-and-Mother of the earth. For man is but a part of the Cosmos—”a solar
product,” as a brilliant English author put it!5 He cannot, with
impunity, set up laws for himself, against those unwritten, everlasting laws
that govern life as a whole. In particular, he cannot disregard the laws that
regulate the art of breeding and the evolution of races, and expect to escape
the consequences which automatically follow, sooner or later, that “sin
against the will of the Creator”6 and which are “physical and
moral degeneracy.” The Christian philosophy—nay, the philosophy of
all those international religions whose adherent “any person” can become, on
a level of equality with all other adherents—puts stress upon the mind, the
“soul,” the “immaterial” side of man (supposed to be everlasting and
all-precious) at the expense of that transient thing: the body. It forgets
that, as the one vehicle of transmission of life, the body also partakes of
divine everlastingness; that it is not merely the “temple of the Holy Ghost,”
but the creator of that consciousness which is the Holy Ghost, in
the individual, in the individual’s progeny, in the race at large. The oldest religions in the world—none of which
were “international,” but all of which applied to the folk in the midst of
whom they sprang the one, superhuman wisdom—stressed the primary importance
of the physical side of man; the holiness of the act of life; the duties and
the responsibilities of the body not only towards the individual “soul” of
which it may be considered as an instrument of development, but towards past
and future generations; towards the race, that is to say, towards the Cosmos,
of which the race is a part. They upheld the private cult of each man’s
ancestors and the public cult of each folk’s heroes, and forbade
objectionable marriages as a sin against the dead and against the
unborn—against Life eternal. They admitted as a matter of course the
fundamental inequality of human beings, rooted in imponderable causes; the
inequality of human races, and the absolute differentiation of the sexes. We have not copied the Ancients. No living thing
is ever a “copy.” And the National Socialist movement, if anything, is
living; nay, is, in spite of the temporary triumph of its enemies, the one
real force of life and resurrection in the half-dead world of today. No, we
have not copied the Ancients. But we have, under the inspiration of that god
among men—Adolf Hitler—become once more aware of the wisdom of all times
without which life is bound to decay; of the wisdom, to the gradual
forgetting of which is to be traced, from the dawn of history onwards, the increasing
degeneracy of mankind and, in particular, the decline of the Aryan nations.
We have become once more conscious of the fact that “only in pure blood does
God abide.”7 And from the man-made religion and man-centred
morality that had dominated Western consciousness for the last fifteen
hundred years at least, we have come back to a life-centred religious
outlook, to a morality based upon the inequality of rights and the diversity
of duties among both individuals and races, and to a political conception
proclaiming the right and the duty of the superior races—and of the superior
personalities in every race—to rule. And we have set out to make this world
first a safe place for the best—for the racial élite of mankind—and then a
safe place for all the living, under the protection of the best.
This is so true that the intelligent and orthodox
representatives of the one part of the world in which the aristocratic
tradition of the Aryans, fossilised as it may have become in the course of
centuries, was never submerged—Hindu India—have more than once judged
National Socialism with a clearer insight than most Europeans outside
Germany. It would astonish many German National Socialists to know what
enthusiasm greeted the Führer’s victories, in that distant land, during the
recent war. There was, undoubtedly, a great deal of enmity towards British
rule expressed in it. But there was in it also, something else, something
deeper, much deeper. There was the expression of six thousand years of
unflinching allegiance to the fair, strong, truly superior Race, the Aryans,
or “noble ones,” worshippers of the Sun and of the Northern Lights, who once
brought the Vedas from their long-forsaken Arctic home,8 and
founded the civilisation which, to this day, in India, still bears their
stamp; the recognition that the spirit of those ancient hallowed Aryans had
at last awakened in their most genuine modern descendants, in far-away
Europe, and was triumphing. India would soon no longer be “the last
stronghold of Aryan culture,” as some Hindu revivalists had called it. For
Aryan culture would reconquer Europe under the rule of one of those men who
appear once in the history of the world. But that Man’s victory—the victory
of the Aryan over the “Mlechha”9; of the ideal of racial
hierarchy over that of democratic uniformity; of inspired leadership over the
vanity of the obstinate herd—would be India’s victory also, for the best of
India’s tradition was the age-old gift of that Man’s eternal Race. And
although not everyone could express this, many felt it, more or less dimly.
Already more than one high-caste Hindu, aware of the real nature of the
European conflict—not Germany versus England, but National Socialism versus
all forms of democracy; the true Aryan outlook versus the Jewish—already more
than one, I say, had acclaimed in the promoter of the western resurrection,
Adolf Hitler, a “devata,” i.e., a “shining one,” a being
above mankind, and the modern incarnation of the ever-recurring Saviour. I
have heard them say so, some of them in public. But out of the hazy consciousness of the
illiterate masses of India, sprang also, in those days, remarkable
intuitions. I shall always remember a young servant—a boy of fifteen or
so—telling me, in glorious ‘40: “I too, admire your Führer.” And as I asked
him if it were only because he was triumphant that he admired him, the boy
replied: “Oh no! I admire him, and love him, because he is fighting to
replace, in the West, the Bible by the Bhagavad-Gita.” He had got that
extraordinary piece of information from a talk in the Calcutta fish market. I
was dumbfounded. For the information, though literally fanciful, was
perfectly accurate in spirit.10 And I recalled in my mind the words of the old
Sanskrit Scripture: “Out of the corruption of women proceeds the confusion of
castes; out of the confusion of castes, the loss of memory; out of the loss
of memory, the lack of understanding; and out of that, all evils,” or, in
modern language: out of indiscriminate breeding proceeds the mixture of
unequal races (always to the detriment of the superior race); from that
mixture, comes the loss of racial memory—the ignorance of who one’s ancestors
were, and of who one is one’s self—and from that, the lack of understanding
of one’s rights and of one’s duties—of one’s natural place in the world—and
the consequence: “all evils,” decay; death. Yes, it was true that the “New Order in Europe”
meant the restoration of the Aryan outlook expressed in this immemorial text,
as opposed to all the religions and ideologies of equality; the triumph of the
Philosophy of the Swastika over that of either the Cross or the Crescent or
the Hammer and Sickle, and the end of that primordial cause of “all evils”:
shameful breeding. And it was true that Adolf Hitler was conducting the war
to defend this New Order against the agents of disintegration who had planned
to crush it. And it was true also, that, for centuries, no great man of
action in the West or in the East had lived and struggled in absolute
selflessness and detachment—actually according to the teaching of the
Bhagavad-Gita—as he had. The marvel is that simple people, so far away, had
found a forceful sentence to formulate that truth.
The central idea of National Socialism is that in
the natural nobility of blood alone, source of the inherent qualities of the
race, lies the secret of greatness. It is no use asking why one race is more
gifted than another; why one has creative genius and others not. It is as
silly as to wonder why a plane tree is not an oak tree. The Sun Himself,
responsible for all differences among men as among other living species, has
decreed from eternity which was to be, on this planet, the creative race par
excellence. And that is why the immemorial solar Symbol—the Swastika—has
become identified with the National Socialist Movement. Behind the will of
Adolf Hitler, who decided that it should be so, was the divine will of the
Sun. It is, in particular, amazing, how historically
sound are all Hitler’s statements concerning the supremacy of the Aryans all
over the world, throughout the ages—all the more so that, at the time he
wrote his famous book, the Führer had seen nothing of the world outside
Germany (save the battlefields of Ypres and other places where he had fought
as a soldier during the First World War) and had never had the time to become
a scholar. He wrote from his heart. Yet, at the other end of
the earth, outlandish monuments, raising their majestic lines out of coconut
groves, under strange skies; hymns and poems in outlandish languages;
atavistic memories and hallowed traditions of strange peoples—some, perhaps
unknown to him in 1923—proclaim the truth of what he wrote. Paintings and
sculptures in South Indian temples, sacred dance dramas on the coast of
Malabar; friezes upon the ruined walls of Angkor Wat; stories repeated to
this day all over India, Java, Bali, perpetuate the glory of the fair Aryan
hero, Rama, whose deeds once filled the East and the South with wonder and
whom the descendants of the subjugated races still revere as a god. And as
one recalls the inspiration behind those works of art and those traditions,
one cannot but marvel at the exactitude of that bold summary of the evolution
of mankind written by the modern champion of the Aryan race in the fortress
of Landsberg am Lech: the eleventh chapter of the first part of Mein
Kampf. Indeed, wherever one admires the tangible remnants of a great
culture (provided one takes the trouble of going far enough back into the
past) one finishes by tracing that culture to the glorious creative Race from
the North to which belong both the fair warriors exalted in the Sanskrit
epics (and portrayed in the technique of their Southern worshippers, on the walls
of Dravidian temples and Cambodian palaces) and the author of Mein Kampf
himself, and his beloved people. The whole of Asia owes more or less its culture
to the influence of Indian thought. And Indian thought—Sanskrit thought—is
but the flower of the Aryan, or Nordic soul, in a tropical environment. And
if, as some scholars believe, one can also prove that the same influences
have given birth to the cultures of old America, to which the Swastika was
also sacred—and that the same fact, namely “the gradual disappearance of the
original creative race” through mixture of blood, has caused their
downfall—then, one will only have proved how extraordinary Hitler’s intuition
of history is, and how solid is the rock on which he founded National
Socialism.
Some have said that Adolf Hitler’s greatness lies
in the fact that he roused German patriotism as none had done before. Those
who hate Germany—those who have, or think they have, some interest in trying
to keep her down—hate him for that very reason. But in reality his greatness
lies in far more than that. For the German patriotism which he roused is not
the conventional patriotism that every European child is taught at school
ever since there were separate states in Europe. It is a particular aspect of
a broader and deeper—and more natural—feeling. It is the expression, in the
German people—the first to have the privilege of regaining it in the West—of
the world-wide Aryan consciousness, which is above frontiers; of the
collective pride of all those who, however far they be living, now, from
their original Nordic home, claim to belong to that truly noble and beautiful
race to whom the world owes the best of its culture. An upheaval such as no nation had yet
experienced—an outburst of regained triumphant youth; a song of joy and
freedom, on a scale of millions—was actually witnessed in Germany under the
spell of Hitler’s magnetic personality, and that, in spite of over fifteen
hundred years of demoralizing influences. But there lies not the whole of the
“German miracle.” It lies also—it lies perhaps even more—in the fact that
Aryans all over the world (few, admittedly, but the very best) hailed Hitler
and Germany with him as the champion of their rights, as the Man and the
country destined to fulfil, at last, their age-old aspirations. It lies in
the fact that, during this war, Englishmen were happy to suffer in
concentration camps in their own country for the National Socialist idea;
that people of several foreign nations at war with Germany—including one or
two Frenchmen11—have died for it; that, in far-away India, in
1942, some men and women were waiting with joy to see the German army march
down from Russia through Afghanistan on the triumphal road the first Aryan
conquerors had taken, six thousand years before—the Khyber Pass—and meet in
Delhi its Japanese Allies; that, after this war, there remained (and
still remains) a minority of non-German Aryans ready to face torture and
death for the pleasure of defying the persecutors of National Socialism upon
the very soil of occupied Germany. This world-wide appeal of Adolf Hitler shows
sufficiently that, although in its modern form it originated in Germany—and
could not possibly have originated anywhere else—the National Socialist
doctrine transcends Germany. As I have said, it is the everlasting truth
about the laws of life and the evolution of human races, apprehended from the
angle of the Nordic race. That this Nordic race is a natural aristocracy,
there is no doubt. First a physical aristocracy. To make sure of that, one
need only look at its representatives, especially the purest Germanic types
among the Germans and the Swedes, outwardly, perhaps, the finest men on
earth. An aristocracy of character also, as a whole. One only has to live
with Scandinavians, Germans, or real English people, after spending
years amidst less pure Aryans, or totally different races, in order to find
that out. An aristocracy of kindness, too—its most attractive sign of
superiority. And this is a fact. The best proof of it is to be seen
in the spontaneous sympathy which most pure-blooded Nordic children show
towards animals, even before being taught to do so. Compare that with the
spontaneous cruelty of the children of other races, with few exceptions! A
five year old young German or young Englishman will stop to caress a cat, or
offer something to eat to a dog in the street. A five year old child from the
Mediterranean lands—or the Middle East—will throw a stone at the dog, pull
the cat’s tail, or do something worse, many a time. The indifference of the
grownups to animal suffering, anywhere in the world save in the few lands
where Nordic blood obviously prevails, is appalling enough, not to speak of
the inborn nastiness of the majority of children. That alone would be sufficient to confirm one’s
belief in the superiority of the pure Aryan, and to strengthen one’s hopes
that, after three or four generations of proper training—and enlightened
breeding—the race could be made a race of supermen, creators of a new
golden-age culture worthy of Nietzsche’s dreams, worthy of Hitler’s love. It
would be enough to confirm one in one’s conviction that the task which
National Socialist Germany had undertaken—the systematic strengthening of the
master race in Europe so that it might carry on an unparalleled
super-civilisation—was, and still is, well worth its while.
That task was begun in Germany, as everyone
knows, by the promulgation of a certain number of wholesome laws, intended to
stop all objectionable breeding (and thereby to prevent the further physical
and moral deterioration of the race), and by a wide-scale new education. When
one remembers that Adolf Hitler took the government in hand in 1933, and that
England, as a docile instrument of international Jewry, declared war on him
in 1939, one can but marvel at the enormousness of what he accomplished
within six years. No god could have done better in so short a time. Yet, the measures actually taken would not have
been sufficient to keep the people in the desired path for centuries without
a new—or very old—religious outlook, expression of the reborn Nordic soul,
coming into being and growing up side by side with the National State. The
prominent men of the Movement—Adolf Hitler more than any other—were aware of
this. And not merely theoreticians like Alfred Rosenberg,12 and
professors of the new thought like Ernst Bergmann13 and others,
but cool and practical-minded thinkers such as Dr. Goebbels,14
have stressed over and over again the necessity of putting an end to the
influence of the Christian Churches of every persuasion if National Socialism
is to enjoy a lasting triumph. Indeed the fact that, owing to the war against
the foreign agents of Jewry, not enough attention could be paid to the
struggle against the Churches and especially against the Catholic Church—that
bitterest of all the opponents of National Socialism at home—that fact, I
say, must be counted as one of the main causes of the loss of the war. The
Churches have proved only too well, by their attitude towards defeated
National Socialism after the war, what a responsibility they had in its
defeat and what an amount of power they expected to enjoy upon its ruins. But there is more than that in the instinctive
dislike we all feel for them, to the extent we are conscious of what we stand
for. The Churches, as temporal organisations, commercialised and
power-grabbing, are bad enough. The Christian “Weltanschauung”
itself is far worse an enemy of National Socialism. It is of no use trying to
hide the fact in order “not to frighten” people: one cannot be at
the same time a Nazi and a Christian of any description. It is nonsense to
say one can. It is wasting time to point out concrete instances of men and
women who actually are. Such people are either bad Christians or bad Nazis or
both; sincere but illogical people, deceiving themselves, or clever rogues,
trying to deceive others. One only has to think five minutes to realise
that a doctrine centred around race and personality cannot possibly go hand
in hand with a teaching that proclaims all human souls equally precious in
the eyes of a God who hates pride. The Churches would perhaps, one day,
contemplate the possibility of compromising with us, if they judged it
expedient. But there can be no compromise whatsoever between Christianity—or,
by the way, between any man-centred religion of equality—and the
Philosophy of the Swastika. If we are to triumph in the end, then,
Christianity must go—whether that pleases or not all our friends who still
today bear the stamp of a Christian upbringing. Christianity must go, so that
the Nordic soul, which it crushed over a thousand years ago, might live and
thrive once more in the strength and pride of its renewed youth; so that
Germany, and all the countries in which the Aryan blood is still alive, might
evolve their own religious consciousness—the consciousness they would
have had if Rome and Jerusalem had never interfered with them. The religion of the reborn Aryans must naturally
have much in common with that of the pre-Christian European North, and with
that, of similar origin and spirit, kept alive to this day, in India, in the
tradition of the Vedas. It must be, before all, the religion of a healthy,
proud, and self-reliant people, accustomed to fight, ready to die, but, in
the meantime, happy to live, and sure to live forever, in their undying race;
a religion centred around the worship of Life and Light—around the cult of
heroes, the cult of ancestors, and the cult of the Sun, source of all joy and
power on earth. Indeed, it must be a religion of joy and of power—and of love
also; not of that morbid love for sickly and sinful “mankind” at the expense
of far more admirable Nature, but of love for all living beauty: for the
woods and for the beasts; for healthy children; for one’s faithful comrades
in every field of activity; for one’s leaders and one’s gods; above all, for
the supreme God, the Life force personified in the Sun, the
“Heat-and-Light-within-the-Disk,” to quote the expressive words of the
greatest Sun-worshipper of Antiquity.15 The religion of the
regenerate Aryans must be one in which the Christian idea of “conception in
sin” gives way to that of conception in honour and joy within the noble race,
the only “sin” being (along with all forms of cowardice and faithlessness)
the sin of shameful breeding—the deadly sin against the race. The conflict between National Socialism and the
Christian Churches in our times, is but an aspect of the age-long struggle
between the creeds of Life which accept the natural hierarchy of human
races—and individuals—no less than of animal species, and which treat man as
a part and parcel of living Nature, and the man-centred creeds which deny the
irreducible differences in quality between one human race and another while
postulating, on the other hand, an artificial abyss between “mankind” as a
whole and the rest of creation. The par excellence man-centred creed
of today—Communism—is but the natural and logical outcome of Western
Democracy based upon “the voice of the majority,” as Adolf Hitler has himself
pointed out a number of times. But Western Democracy, in its turn, is but the
natural and logical outcome of centuries of Christian teaching. All
Rousseau’s sentimental twaddle and the subsequent nonsense about the “equal
rights” of all human beings, to which the French Revolution owes its prestige
both at home and abroad, would have been unthinkable in a Pagan Europe,
unaffected from the start by the original Jewish twaddle about the equal
rights of all human souls and the subsequent “dignity of all men” in the eyes
of a man-loving God. Those of us who fully realise this, and to whom
what I have called the Philosophy of the Swastika—expression of their own
deeper aspirations—is the only satisfactory one, can face with calm the
present and the coming hardships. No democratic, humanitarian, or Christian
propaganda, whether outspoken or in disguise, can alter them. They
form that chosen minority of real Nazis around whom, one day—after the coming
crash—the remnants of the undaunted Aryan race will gather to start a new
historical cycle, under Hitler’s undying inspiration. Notes 1 Longer Hymn to the Sun, circa 1,400 BC. 2 Bhagavad-Gita, 1:41-42; based on Eugène
Burnouf’s nineteenth century French translation—Ed. 3 “All great cultures of the past perished only
because the originally creative race died of blood poisoning” (Mein Kampf,
I, xi, p. 316; cf. Mannheim, p. 289) [Trans. by Ed.]. 4 This is a paraphrase of ideas expressed in Mein
Kampf I, v, pp. 186-89; Mannheim, pp. 170-72.—Ed. 5 Norman Douglas, How about Europe? Some
Footnotes on East and West (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930). 6 Mein Kampf, I, xi, p. 314; cf.
Mannheim, p. 286. 7 Wulf Sörensen [Heinrich Himmler], Die Stimme
der Ahnen. Eine Dichtung (Magdeburg: Nordland, 1936), p. 36. [In English:
The Voice of the Ancestors: A Poetical Work by Wulf Sörensen, trans.
anonymous (Hammer, 1993), p. 39.—Ed.] 8 Lokamanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, The Arctic
Home in the Vedas: Being Also a New Key to the Interpretation of Many Vedic
Texts and Legends (Poona: Kesari, 1903). 9 The word used, in ancient Sanskrit Scriptures,
to designate the inferior races. 10 For a more complete telling of this
story, see Savitri Devi, “Hitlerism and the Hindu World,” The National
Socialist, no. 2 (Fall 1980): 18-20.—Ed. 11 Such as Robert Brasillach, shot on 6
February 1945. 12 Author of the famous Myth of the
Twentieth Century, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hoheneichen,
1930). 13 Professor at the University of Leipzig
under the National Socialist régime, author of Die 25 Thesen der
deutschen Religion. 14 See the numerous passages of the
Goebbels Diaries attacking the Churches. 15 King Akhnaton of Egypt, circa 1,400 BC. |
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