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Fascism and the New Age

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educatedindian:
In the US, Behold a Pale Horse is very popular among both the militia/"patriot" movement, and fundamentalists/End Times believers.

The two people Devi is mentioned having ties to, George Rockwell and William Pierce, are very big names in the US Far Right. Rockwell founded the US Nazi Party after WWII. Pierce's National Alliance is probably the biggest US fascist group. And the Turner Diaries are what influenced Tim McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

A search of "Savitra Devi" "New Age" gives you 600 hits, though many are links examining the ties or selling Goodrich-Clarke's book. Found Devi quoted lovingly at an Asatru site, http://www.vaidilute.com/asatru.html
and at a neo-Nazi site book review
http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/2005/022105letters.htm
:Is 'Merrie England' ready for armed revolt?
The Uprising by Colin Jordan.
Published by NS Publications, 2004
"Jordan went on to found the White Defence League, which merged with other organisations into the first incarnation of the British National Party. In 1962, he founded the National Socialist Movement, and that same year was instrumental in setting up the World Union of National Socialists, along with George Lincoln Rockwell, Savitri Devi, John Tyndall, and others."

And quoted at a conspiracy site by "the Big Underground Nazi" when discussing why he hates Jews.
http://www.voxfux.com/archives/00000085.htm

One UFO site will put you in contact with a disciple of Devi's, Ernst Zundel, a neo Nazi imprisoned in Canada who wrote about "Nazi flying saucers."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ufonet/message/15373

And I think you posted this link a while back, the Rainbow Swastika, when talking about Ickes and Alice Bailey.
http://texasturkey.us/backup/na_nazism.html

educatedindian:
Another big name in Far Right Nuage circles is Julius Evola, over 700 links. Amazon sells his books, and the defenses offered of him in the reviews are pretty creepy.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/089281506X/002-3969928-9400846?v=glance

Celebratory bios of him.
http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/jenseitseng.html
http://www.omhros.gr/Kat/History/Txt/Gl/Marxism/JulEvola.htm

New Age and the Polish Right
http://www.cesnur.org/2003/vil2003_mikolejko.htm

A chaos magick bookstore selling his book.
http://www.dagonproductions.com/newbks.htm

Stormfront White Nationalist site discussing Nuage and other books.
http://www.stormfront.org/archive/t-106271A_Curriculum_for_the_Initiate_of_Magick.html

Barnaby_McEwan:
I think we can agree that new age thinking is riddled with authoritarianism, antisemitism, racism, contempt for the suffering of others and so on, all of which have obvious parallels in fascism. Given that, I think there are bound to be lots of people who are attracted to both ideologies. I think what's going on with neo-fascists' rediscovery of people like Savitri Devi is that they're latching onto a 'colourful' figure and crediting her with more influence than she really had. It was Rockwell and Pierce, not Devi, who led influential and unfortunately sometimes effective neo-nazi groups. She may have been 'connected' with them, but what evidence is there that she influenced them? Can we find new age/occultist ideas in their writings or recorded speeches? Did they tell their followers to study astrology or yoga, for example?

I think Hannah Newman's documentation of nuage antisemitism is valuable, but her overall view of the phenomenon is far too conspiratorial for my liking. She also uncritically quotes completely unreliable authors like Trevor Ravenscroft when writing about Hitler's supposed occult career. I think she'd benefit from reading the appendix to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's 'The Occult Roots of Nazism', which surveys postwar books on the Nazis and the occult and lays bare the abysmal scholarship and outright invention of some of them.

Also I don't think her portrait of Nazism as an 'occult-based' movement is very realistic. Fiirstly most Nazis saw themselves as good Christians, leadership included. Secondly it makes the Nazi leadership sound much more cohesive than it really was. I wish I had the time to properly study this, but my limited reading to date leads to the opinion that the Nazi regime was run on all levels like a gangster empire, all leaders feuding with each other and jockeying for favour with the big boss.

Some Nazi leaders, like Himmler, Hess, and Darré, were very interested in occultism but others were revolted by it, seeing it as a 'Jewish' spiritual perversion.

I agree with you about Evola's defenders. I think he was probably a pretty creepy guy. Here are a couple of pages on yet another book I haven't had time to read:

http://www.aucegypt.edu/faculty/sedgwick/trad/book.htm

http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/atmw.htm

The other major Western figure who espoused Traditionalism is our old friend Mircea Eliade. He was Romanian, and was an enthusiastic member of Romania's home-grown fascist movement before WWII:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:sDy7LttdUOoJ:users.ox.ac.uk/~sjoh0748/Malaise.htm+eliade+sympathy+fascination+iron+guard&hl=en

(Later: I've changed a mistake: 'good Catholics' now reads 'good Christians')

educatedindian:
If you look at the Stormfront site you'll see a long debate between neo Nazis who know quite a bit about yoga, reincarnation, "magick", hermeticism, and ironically, the Kaballah.

Another very elaborate discussion of Nuage/hermetic/pagan ideas is at
http://www.whiterevolution.com/archives/200308

Also found someone complaining on Liberty Forum about too many Nuagers coming on there. (Liberty Forum/Lobby is a clearinghouse for all kinds Far Right types.) http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_members&Number=293177440&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=21&part=11

In a weird way we might even be grateful they spend their time on silly debates instead of far worse things.

Serrano clearly did use quite a few Nuage ideas, and he's a pretty big figure in his country's fascist movement. Evola's works are all over the place listed as influential on neo Nazis.

Found this in a review of a book on Pierce.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0759609330/qid=/sr=/ref=cm_lm_asin/002-3969928-9400846?v=glance
"Griffin not only conducts interviews with Dr. Pierce, he makes sure to read books that have influenced Pierce throughout his life. Griffin provides exegesis on several books and prominent figures of the movement. George Shaw's Man and Superman, Adolf Hitler and Mein Kampf, Revilo Oliver, Savitri Devi, George Lincoln Rockwell and William Gayley Simpson are all examined in minute detail by Griffin."
And the book has an entire chapter on Pierce's belief in "cosmotheism."

I'm not trying to tie Nuage to the fascism at its high tide, since the Nuage didn't start until 30 years later. And I realize neo Nazis are more often influenced by ideas like Christian Identity, at least in the US. I'm more interested in seeing how common it is for Nuagers to look the other way when they endorse writers on the Far Right like Blavatasky, Eliade, Devi, and Evola.

educatedindian:
A piece of an interesting speech at a conference.

"Despite the spies and flying saucers, neo-fascism was essentially backward-looking into the 1960s. People like George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party would dress up like storm troopers and go get beaten up. James Madole and his National Renaissance Party tried to promulgate a novel synthesis of theosophy, science fiction and fascism, but they were just street-corner cranks.

In the 1970s, the situation changed. Nazi Germany became Atlantis, a magical society that had sunk out of sight, but which might someday rise again. There had always been a literature about the role of the occult in the Third Reich. With the rise of the New Age Movement, this kind of interpretation became not just popular but plausible. Pseudo-historical accounts like Trevor Ravencroft's "Spear of Destiny," 22 in which Hitler is portrayed as an evil magician, were wildly inaccurate on their face, but they are fun to read, so many people did.

To some extent, the magical Reich was just a new story device; Nazi villains had something new to be villainous about. On the other hand, a wing of the budding Satanist movement decided that, if the Nazis were that evil, then they must have been onto something, so they began a revival of folkish magic and Nazi themes. These became important in Black Metal and Industrial music. 23 On the less extreme end, pro-Nazi science fiction began to appear. Those mythological postwar Nazi bases played a role, as did the hidden underground realms of Agarthi and Shambalah, and hollow-earth theories having to do with secret entrances in the Arctic to the land of the Titans. 24
As Goodrick-Clarke points out, another factor that favored the expansion of esoteric fascism was the beginning of large-scale immigration into Western Europe. In his analysis, it was the immigration into central Europe in the late 19th century that gave the earlier occult revival its popular traction. Political terrorism and vandalism in the '60s and '70s had been largely a leftist activity. In the '80s and '90s, it increasingly became a right-wing affair. Goodrick-Clarke suggests that neo-Nazism is a form of multiculturalism; it's just another instance of people making up an ethnic identity and clinging to it for dear life. 25

The New Age was less innocent than it seemed. It was not an accident, as the Marxists used to say, that Mircea Eliade was Julius Evola's long-time correspondent. Back in the 1970s, William Irwin Thompson and David Spangler and the Lindisfarne Foundation were clearly getting ready for the end of Evola's Kali Yuga. 26 Actually, the best fictional presentation of the whole esoteric scenario I know of is in Doris Lessing's forays into science fiction, particularly "Shikasta" 27 and "The Sirian Experiments." Even "The Lord of the Rings" starts to look fishy, because there are few more attractive portrayals of the world of Tradition. Italian fascists use the books for recruiting, to the continuing horror of the Tolkien Society."
http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/ata.htm

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