by Savitri Devi

Chapter 4 of Souveniers et réflexions d'une Aryenne
(Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Woman)

Translated by R.G. Fowler

Illustration: Josef Thorak’s bust of Friedrich Nietzsche

“And shame at being a man also stabbed his heart.”
—Leconte de Lisle (“The Holocaust,” Tragic Poems)

“This appalling logic.” On 9 October 1948, Mr. Rudolf Grassot, Assistant Chief of the Office of Information of the French Occupation in Baden-Baden, said this to me while describing our intellectual consistency . . . without, of course, suspecting at the time “to whom” he spoke. I treasure these words, which flatter us, along with a number of other homages—always involuntary—from the adversary, in Europe or elsewhere.

As for me, there are few things that shock me about mammals that profess to “think”—that never cease to emphasize the superiority that this “thought” is perceived to give them over the living things that they believe are completely deprived of it—as much as the absence of logic. It shocks me because it is a lack of agreement between thought and life in the same individual, even between two or more aspects of his thought itself; because it is internal contradiction, negation of harmony, therefore weakness and ugliness. And the higher someone in whom one encounters this is placed in the conventional hierarchy of “intellectuals,” i.e., the lettered, preferably university graduates or technicians from some great school, the more this absence of reasoning capacity shocks me. But it is simply unbearable for me in whoever proclaims the Hitlerian faith and follows some religious or philosophical doctrine obviously incompatible with Hitlerism.

Why is that? Why, for example, do the millions of people called “animal lovers” who deny that they are slaves of any custom and yet eat meat “to be inconspicuous,” seem less irritating to me than the tens of thousands who say they are at the same time Hitlerians and Christians? Are the first less illogical than the second? Certainly not! But they form a majority that I already know is dishonest and slack or weak, which are almost the same thing; a majority that, in spite of the few interesting individuals among it, I scorned since my earliest childhood and from which I expect nothing. The others are my brothers in faith, or those whom I have, up to now, believed such. They form an élite that I loved and exalted because it carries, today as yesterday, the same sign as me—the eternal Swastika—and hails the same Master; an élite on which I relied as a thing that is self-evident, this perfect accord of thought with itself and with life, this absolute logic that one of our enemies, without knowing who I was, described to me as “appalling” on 9 October 1948, the forty-first anniversary of the birth of Horst Wessel.

Inconsistency is either folly or bad faith, or compromise—folly, dishonesty, or weakness. A Hitlerian, however, cannot by definition be foolish, dishonest, or weak. Whoever is afflicted by one of these three disqualifications cannot be counted among the militant minority, hard and pure, dedicated body and soul to the fight for the survival and the reign of the best—our fight. Unfortunately, it was indeed necessary—and will be necessary for a long time to come, if we want to act on the material plane—to accept, if not the allegiance, at least the services of a mass of people who, viewed from outside, appeared and perhaps appear to be Hitlerians, but who, in fact, were not and are not, could not and cannot be, precisely because of the absence of consistency inherent in their psychology. What to do? They had and they have—and will have for a long time to come—the numbers and . . . the money that no movement with a practical program can entirely do without. They should be used . . . without however placing too much confidence in them. One should not argue with them; for if they are blockheads, it accomplishes nothing; if they are insincere, it accomplishes nothing as well. And if they are weak . . .  the revelation of their inconsistency can have the opposite effect on them that one would have wished.

As soon as Hermann Rauschning realized that he could not be a Hitlerian and a Christian at the same time, he chose Christianity and wrote the virulent book, Hitler Speaks,¹ which the enemy hastened to translate into several languages. Unless told, he may never have realized it and might have continued, as did so many other good average Christians, to lavish all the services he could on the cause of Germany, and beyond that, the Aryan cause. It was these who should have been allowed to sleep.

So many sleepers—the logically inconsistent—are, on the practical plane, more useful than us, the small core of militants without compromise!

In his letter of 26 June 1966, the late George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American National Socialist Party,² who was destined, fourteen months later, to fall to an assassin’s bullet, wrote to me, among other things: “An examination of our revenues would clarify the indisputable fact that most of our money comes from pious Christians (devout Christians). People like you cannot send one cent to us—and even, apparently, need financial assistance themselves . . .” And a little further:

In a word, without ammunition, even the greatest strategist in the world would lose a war. And if those people who hold a monopoly on ammunition require that I repeat every morning, three times, ‘abracadabra,’ in order to obtain from them enough weapons to destroy the enemy, then not three times, but nine times will I say ‘abracadabra,’ whether it be insults or lies or anything else. When we have taken power, our position will be entirely different. However, I would venture to say that, even then, the Master Himself did not allow himself to go beyond moderation, in the direction you indicate. He agreed with you, and with all true National Socialists without compromise. There is not a shadow of a doubt. But He was also a realist—a realist who knew how to use force, and how!

He replied to my letter of 26 April 1966, in which I had very frankly expressed the disappointment I had felt when reading certain issues of the monthly “Bulletin” of the American National Socialist Party. (In one of those were spread out from side to side, in three rectangles, three symbols, each one with a word of explanation: a Christian cross, “our faith”!—a flag of the United States, “our fatherland”—and finally a Swastika, “our race.”) Rockwell answered my criticisms, my doctrinal intransigence, my exacting logic. And, from the practical point of view, he was a hundred times right. Someone who gives dollars to the NSWPP is more useful, certainly, than someone who writes a hundred lines not “of propaganda” (adapted to the immediate concerns and the tastes of a majority of people at one moment of time), but of truth, i.e., of propositions whose intrinsic value will be the same in ten thousand, and in ten thousand times ten thousand years, and always, and that justify our combat of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

But there is more: the man and woman of good Aryan blood who, like—alas—so many of our brothers in race, ardently hate both our Führer and ourselves, but create a child destined to be, one day, one of us, are even more useful still than the individual who gives financial support to our militants. The parents of Goebbels, who did not have any sympathy for the Hitlerian Movement, did more for it simply by having this child than the magnates of German heavy industry who (without knowing what they were doing any more than the “pious Christians” of the USA whom Rockwell mentions in its letter) financed the election campaigns of the National Socialists from 1926 to 1933. In fact, each is useful in his way. And there are services of such different natures that they do not compare. Each has its value.

The fact remains that I read again with pride the sentence that Rockwell wrote to me a little more than a year before his tragic death: “The Master”—the Führer—“He agreed with you, and with all true National Socialists without compromise. There is not a shadow of a doubt.” He added, it is true, that he was “also a realist”—a man knowing how to act in view of immediate success—while I, his disciple, am not. But I myself am not a leader. And did not the Führer himself, in making some decisions with the weightiest of consequences, place the “appalling logic” of our Weltanschauung above immediate material success? Could he, for example, have done something other than attack Russia, citadel of the Marxism, on 22 June 1941? Or before, in refusing the Molotov proposals of 11 November 1940? (As exorbitant as these were, to accept them would have been, it seems, less tragic than to risk war on two fronts.)

* * *

The more an argument is rigorous, impeccable purely from the logical point of view, the more its conclusion is false, if the basic judgment from which it departs—that which expresses its “major” premise, in the case of a simple syllogism—is itself false. That is clear. If I declare that, “All men are saints,” and if I note then that the Marquis de Sade and all sexual perverts known and unknown, and all abusers of animals or children, “were or are men,” I am rightly forced to conclude that all these people “were or are saints,” an assertion whose absurdity is obvious. Perfect logic leads to a true judgment only if it is applied from the beginning to premises that are themselves true. The adjectives by which one characterizes such a rigor in the concatenation of judgments, depends upon the attitude one has with respect to the judgments from which it departs. If one accepts them, one will speak of an irreproachable or admirable logic. If one vehemently rejects them, as Mr. Grassot rejected the basic propositions of Aryan racialism, in other words, Hitlerism, one will speak of “appalling logic.” That is of no importance, for the judgments remain true or false, independent of one’s reception of them, which is always subjective.

However, what about a true judgment?

Any judgment expresses a relationship between two established facts, two possibilities, or an established fact (and all the psychological states belong to this category) and a possibility. If I say, for example, “The weather is nice,” I pose the relationship between the whole ensemble of feelings that I presently test, and the presence of the sun in the visible sky. If I say: “The sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles,” I propose that, if a polygon has the characteristics that mathematically define the triangle, the sum of its angles will be, and could only be, equal to two right angles; that there is a necessary relationship between the very definition of the “triangle,” and the property to which I referred. If I say: “It is better to lose one’s life than to violate one’s honor!” I propose a relationship—no less necessary in principle—between my psychology and any possible situation in which it would be necessary for me to choose either to live dishonored or else to die to preserve my honor.

A judgment is true if the relationship it expresses exists. It is false in the contrary case. That is clear in the case of the Judgments—called “categorical”—that pose a relationship between two facts. If I say in the middle of the day that “night is falling,” it is quite certain that there is no longer a connection between what my senses experience and what I say; the judgment is thus false at the place and time when it is expressed. If I say: “The sum of angles of triangle is equal to five right angles,” I say nonsense, because relationship that I pose there between the definition of a triangle and a property that I ascribe to it does not exist; because the assertion of the property contradicts the judgment that defines the triangle. (Even in non-Euclidean space with a positive curve, in which the sum of the angles of a triangle “exceeds” two right angles, this sum does not reach “five right angles.”)

In the case of categorical judgments, which express a relationship between two facts, as in that of the perfect hypothetical judgments that constitute all the theorems of mathematics, “truth” or “falsehood” are quite strongly in evidence. It is certain that nobody will accept it, if I declare in full day that “night is falling”—because any healthy eye is sensitive to the light. As for mathematical theorems, they demonstrate everything, provided that one accepts, in the case of geometrical theorems, the postulates that define the particular space they are related to.

The only judgments people dispute—to the point of declaring war over them—are value judgments; those that presuppose, in whoever expresses them, a hierarchy of preferences. It is, indeed, always in the name of such a hierarchy that one seizes a relationship between a fact (or a state of mind) and a “possibility” (future, or . . . conceived retrospectively, as what could have been). The facts can give place to animated discussions, undoubtedly, but deprived of passion, and especially of hatred. One does not really quarrel with one’s adversaries and, if one has the ability, one does not prevail against them, if one holds the “facts,” which are the object of discussion, as directly or indirectly related to the values that one loves. The Church was hostile to those who maintained that the earth is round and that it is not the center of the solar system, insofar as it believed it saw in these facts—in cases where they could be proven, hence universally accepted—the negation not merely of the letter of the Scriptures, but above all of Christian anthropocentrism. The biological facts that serve as the basis of any intelligent racialism are denied by organizations such as UNESCO, which are keen on “culture,” yet only because these organizations see, in their wide scale acceptance, the “threat” of a resurgence of Aryan racialism, which they hate.

* * *

Is there objectivity in the field of values? To this question, I answer yes. There is something independent of the “taste” of each critic of art that makes a masterpiece of painting, sculpture, or poetry a masterpiece for all times. There are, behind any perfect creation—and not only in the field of art properly so called—the secret correspondences, a whole network of “proportions” that themselves “point out” cosmic equivalences unknown but intimated. These are the elements that attach the work to the eternal—in other words, that confer an objective value on it.

On the other hand, there is no universal scale of preferences. Even if one could penetrate the mystery of the structure of eternal creations, which are human in name only—for there the author is effaced by the Force (the Ancients would have said “the God”), that possessed him for a while and acted through and by him—if one could, I say, explain in clear propositions like those of mathematicians why such creations are eternal, one could never force everyone to prefer the eternal to the temporal; to find a work that reflects something of the harmony of the cosmos more pleasant, more satisfactory than another that does not reflect it at all. There are good and bad taste. And there are moral consciences that reconcile more or less what a man would have with a scale of values that would be objective. But there is no more a universal conscience than a universal taste. They do not and cannot exist, for the simple reason that the aspirations of men are different, beyond the level of the most elementary needs. (And even these needs are more or less pressing, according to the individual. There are people who find life bearable, even beautiful, without comforts, pleasures, or attachments, the lack of which would render other persons frankly unhappy.)

Whoever says different aspirations, means different preferences. Whoever says different preferences, means different reactions to the same events, different decisions in the face of identical dilemmas, and thus different ways of organizing lives which, without that, would have resembled each other.

Never forget the diversity of men, even within the same race, and with stronger reason if one passes from one race to another. How can beings so different from each other have all the “same rights and the same duties”?

There is no more a universal duty than there is a universal conscience. Or, if one wants absolutely to find a formula that would be true for all, it will have to be said that the duty of all men—and more: of any living being—is to be until the end, in its visible or secret manifestations, what it is in its deep nature; never to betray itself.

But natures differ profoundly. From whence comes, in spite of all, the diversity of duties, like rights, and inevitable conflict in the plane of facts between those who have opposing duties. The Bhagavad-Gita says it: “Devote yourself to achieving your own duty (svadharma). The duty of another entails (for you) many dangers.”

And what, in practice, will decide the outcome of a conflict between people whose duties are opposed? Force. Truly, that is all I can see. If it eludes me, well I am obliged to support the presence in the world of institutions that I regard as criminal, given my own scale of values. I can hate them. I cannot abolish them with the stroke of a pen, as I would do if I had the power. And even those who have the power cannot do it—to the extent that they require the collaboration of certain men, if not of a majority, precisely to maintain the position they have conquered. But I will say more later about force, the condition of any visible and abrupt change, i.e., of any victorious revolution on the material plane. I will first say some words about the fathers of “universal conscience” and the idea that it leads to: the idea of a “duty” that would be the same for all. I will only point out the names of some of them who, in domains other than morals, have distinguished themselves by some preeminence: by the vigor of their thought or the beauty from their prose.

First there is Immanuel Kant, who is known to have had a boundless desire to trace the line of demarcation between scientific knowledge and metaphysical speculation; between what one knows, or what one can know, and that about which one can speak only arbitrarily, because one knows nothing at all, or has a direct vision of something ineffable. All parts of Kant’s works that treat the subordination of thought to the categories of space and time and our inability, where we are, to transcend by our conceptual intelligence the sphere of “phenomena,” is of an exemplary solidity. The instructions that this thinker gives to help any man to discover his “duty,” which he believed to be the same for all, are less worthy of credence, and precisely because they are unrelated to that which, according to Kant’s own arguments, constitutes the essence of the scientific spirit.

We are here in the field of values—not of “facts”—not of “phenomena.” The only “fact” that one could note in this connection, is none other than the diversity of scales of values. And Kant does not recognize that at all. He thinks his concept of “duty” is based on that of “reason.” And since reason is “universal,” being the laws of discursive thought—two and two make four for the lowest Negroes as well as for one of us—it seems quite necessary that duty be as well. Kant does not realize, insofar as his own values appeared indisputable to him, that it is not “reason” at all, but rather his austere Christian education—pietist, to be more precise—that dictated them to him; that he owes them, not to his capacity to draw conclusions from given premises—a capacity that he indeed shares with all men of sound mind, and perhaps with the higher animals—but indeed to his voluntary submission to the influence of the moral milieu in which he was raised. He forgets—and how many forgot it before and after him, and forget it still!—that reason is impotent to set ends, to establish orders of preferences; that, in the domain of values, its role is restricted to bringing to light logical—or practical—connections between a given end and the means to its realization.

Reason can indicate to an individual what his “duty” will be in a precise circumstance, “if,” for example, he loves all men, or better still, all living beings. It cannot force him to love them, if he himself feels nothing that attracts him to them. It can suggest to him what he should or should not to if he wants to contribute to “world peace.” It cannot force him to want peace. And if he would not like it, whether he would consider it demoralizing or simply tedious, it would suggest to him, with an equal logic, a completely different position and action—the same as it would direct the intelligent, thus lucid, misanthrope towards an action completely different from what it would order the philanthropist. It will always order those who reflect to promote of what each really loves and profoundly wants. How could it inspire duties that are identical in content in individuals who love different, even incompatible, ideals, each of whom would have the revolution that his ideal implies? Or with individuals who love only people, and others who themselves love only ideas?

“Always act,” said Kant, “as if the principle of your action could be set up as a universal law.” How to apply this “rule” at the same time to the conduct of one who, loving only his family and friends, far from sacrificing them to some idea, will feel that it is “his duty” to protect them at all costs, and to the conduct of the militant who, not loving them as much as a cause that surpasses them, considers that it would be “his duty,” if necessary, to sacrifice to it his recent collaborators (as soon as he felt them weaken in the field of orthodoxy and become dangerous), and a fortiori his family, foreign to the holy ideology, as soon as he saw one of its members, no matter who, make a pact with hostile forces?

And what is the meaning of the rule: “Act always such that you take a human being as an end, never as a means”? In other words: “never use a man.”³ And why not?—above all if, by using him, I work in the interest of a Cause that surpasses him by far, for example, the cause of Life, or of the human élite (a particular case of the élite of each living species) or simply that of a particular people if it has a historical mission that is more than human? Man exploits without scruples the animal and the tree, in favor of what he believes to be his own interest. And Kant apparently found nothing to reprove in this. For why should we not exploit them, we human beings—the “human person” of alleged “value” that has been beaten into our ears for more than a quarter century—in the interest of Life itself? What prevents us, if we do not have—like Immanuel Kant and so many others, like the majority of people born and raised within Christian civilization (or Islamic, or Jewish, or simply “secular”)—a scale of values centered around the sacrosanct mammal with two legs?

For myself, if I love “all men,” I will not make use of any them; I will not take any of them “as means” for an end that is not his. One does not exploit what one truly loves. It is a psychological law. But no “reason” can force me “to love all men”—no more than it can force the majority of men to love all animals. “Reason” enjoined Kant not to exploit any human being, not because it is a universal commandment, but because he himself loved all men, as the good Christian he was. I, who do not love them all, I do not feel that this “duty” pertains to me at all. It is not my duty. I refuse to submit to it. And if a man who finds the exploitation of animals and trees—and what exploitation!—quite natural, has the impudence to come to preach to me (to preach to us) “respect for human dignity,” I tell him brutally to mind his own business.

* * *

But Kant—so independent and so able in the domain of the critique of cognition—had in morals, beyond even the Christian teaching of his family, an intellectual guide: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose influence continued to be felt, at that time, in all Europe.

It is difficult to imagine two men more different from each other than Rousseau, the perpetual wanderer with a somewhat disordered life—to say the least—and the meticulous Herr Professor Immanuel Kant, whose days and weeks were all the same, unfolding according to a rigorous schedule, without the least place for the unforeseen or the whimsical. In his works, Jean-Jacques Rousseau does not miss any opportunity to exalt “reason” . . . as well as “virtue.” But he does not seem to have had any code of conduct other than his imagination, or his impulses, with the result that the story of his life gives an impression of inconsistency, not to say instability. Poet rather than thinker, he did not live his life, he dreamed it. And above all, he did not live according to fixed principles.

The love for children he professes whenever possible did not prevent him from putting five of his, one after the other, in an orphanage, under the pretext that the woman who had given them to him, Thérèse Levasseur, would have been unable to raise them in the spirit that he would have wished. And this abandonment, five times repeated, did not prevent him from writing a book on the education of children, and what is worse, did not prevent the public from taking it seriously.⁴ It was taken seriously because, while believed without doubt to be strongly original, it reflected the deep tendencies of its time, above all the revolt against the Tradition in the name of “reason.”

It is not astonishing that spirits opposed to visible traditional authorities, i.e., kings and clergy, chose it with enthusiasm as their guide, and placed under his ensign the French Revolution that they organized. It seems, at first glance, less natural that Kant was so strongly subject to his influence.

But Kant was of his time, namely the time when Rousseau had seduced the European intelligentsia, partly by his poetic prose and paradoxes, partly by some clichéd words that recur on every subject in his work: the words “reason,” “conscience,” and “virtue.” These are the clichés that furnished the little imagination Kant had with the occasion for all the flight of which it was capable, that gave to the German philosopher the form of his morals. The contents of which—as with even Rousseau himself and all the “philosophes” of the eighteenth century and, before them, Descartes, the true spiritual father of the French Revolution—are drawn from the old core of Christian ethics, centered on the dogma of the “dignity” of man, the only being created “in the image of God,” and in this respect a privileged being. In other words, with a meticulous honesty and an application and perseverance that is quite Prussian, Kant endeavored to establish a system of current European morals, humanitarian because originally Christian, that Rousseau had glorified in sentimental effusions—the morals that Nietzsche was one day to have the honor of demolishing with a feather, and that we were later destined to deny in action.

* * *

No doubt all men have something in common—be this only an upright stance and articulated language—that is not possessed by other living species. Every species is characterized by something possessed in common by all its members and of which members of other species are deprived. The suppleness and purring of felines are features that no other species can claim. We do not dispute that all human races have a certain number of common features, by sole virtue of being human. What we dispute—and how!—is that these common features are worthier of our attention than are, on the one hand, the enormous differences that exist between one human race and another (and often between human individuals of the same race) and, on the other hand, the features that all living things, including plants, have in common.

In our eyes a Negro or a Jew, or a Levantine without well-defined race, has neither the same duties nor the same rights as a pure Aryan. They are different; they belong to worlds that, whatever may be their points of contact on the material plane, remain foreign to one another. They are different by nature—biologically others. The acquisition of a “common culture” could not bring them closer—or only superficially and artificially—because “culture” is nothing if it does not have deep roots in nature.

Besides, our point of view is not new. Already the Laws of Manu assigned the Brahmin and Sudra—and people of each caste—different duties and rights . . . and very different penalties to the possible murderers of members of different castes. And caste is—and was especially in ancient India—above all related to race. (It is called varna, which is to say “color,” and also jat: race.)

Less far from us in time, and in Europe where contrasts between races were never so extreme, the legislation of the Merovingian Francs, like that of the Ostrogoths of Italy and the other Germans established in conquered countries, provided for the murder of a man of Nordic race—a German—penalties incommensurable with those that the murderer of Gallo-Roman or an Italian incurred, especially if the latter were of servile condition. No idea that is justified by a healthy racism is new.

In addition, we do not understand this priority granted to “man”—no matter what man, no matter what situation—over other living species, for the sole reason that “he is a man.” How adamantly the devotees of man-centered religions believe in this priority and hold to it in all walks of daily life, even today! It is, for them, an article of faith—the logical consequence of a dogma. And the faith is not discussed. But likewise, thinkers and multitudes of people who are not attached to any Church, who even fight all revealed religion, adopt the exact same attitude and find the lowest human refuse more worthy of solicitude than the healthiest and most beautiful animals (or plants); they refuse us the “right” to not only kill without suffering, but even to sterilize, defective human beings, whereas the life of an animal in full health and full force does not count in their eyes, and they will without remorse cut down a beautiful tree for being “inconvenient”; this is what shocks us deeply; what revolts us.

Apparently, all these minds that pride themselves on their independence, all these “free” thinkers, are—just as much as the devotees of religions centered on man and so-called “human dignity”—slaves of the prejudices that the West, and most of the East, have inherited from Judaism. If they rejected the dogmas and mythology of anthropocentric religions, they completely kept their values. That is as true of the Deists of the eighteenth century as of our atheistic Communists. In fact, there exists—even if the majority of anticommunist Christians reject this idea with indignation—a profound parallelism between Christianity and Marxism. Both are originally Jewish products. Both received the imprint of a more or less decadent Aryan thought: in the first case, that subtle Hellenistic philosophy, overloaded with allegories and preaching the most unlikely syncretisms; in the second case: not the true scientific spirit, which guards against error, but what I will call “scientism”—the propensity to replace the faith in traditional ideas with faith in all that is presented under the name of “science.” And above all, at bottom both are centered on the same values: on the cult of man as the only being created “in the image and likeness” of the God of the Jews, or simply as being of the same species as the Marxist who glorifies him. The practical result of anthropocentrism is the same, whatever may be the source.

* * *

It is precisely this anthropocentrism, shared by Christianity and Communism, and all “humanisms,” that served as the philosophical cement of the seemingly incongruous alliance of the Western world, Christian or “rationalist,” and of the Soviet Union, during the Second World War.

It was, in the eyes of more than one Christian, rather painful to see the glorious alliance with atheistic Communism in the fight against us disciples of Adolf Hitler. What is more, Christians or not, many Westerners felt more or less confusedly that this alliance was politically an error; that their country, whatever it was, would have had more to gain—or less to lose—as a State by giving a hand to Adolf Hitler (or by accepting the hand the Führer offered to them) and fighting at his side “against Bolshevism.” The voice of the Leader of Germany, who more and more despairingly invited them “to save Europe,” troubled them, sometimes.

And yet . . . it is not in the ranks of the French Volunteer Legion or some similar organization that they ended up, but in those of the members of some “Resistance” group, anti-German undoubtedly, but also and inevitably anti-Aryan. It is that their subconscious had informed them that, while following the politically wisest course of action, they would have betrayed what for them was more significant than politics: their world of values. It is that it had amazed them, as post-war authors arising from the Resistance soon did not weary to repeat to satiety during a quarter century (and who knows how much longer?), namely that Hitlerism, or Aryan racialism in its modern form, like any racialism based on the idea of a natural élite (not “chosen” arbitrarily by some too human “God”) is “the negation of man.” Consequently, this Europe that the Führer invited them to forge with him—that which would have finally led to our victory—was not what they wanted to preserve. And the “atheistic Bolshevism,” or simply Bolshevism opposed to free enterprise and honest private property, which our propaganda tried to make them fear, appeared to them, in the final analysis, less frightening that the spirit of our doctrines.

But there is more. Very few of those who sincerely believed themselves our allies and who fought and died with us in the fight against anti-Aryan values, had comprehended the true meaning of the message of the Führer; the call of the eternal Hero “against Time,” who returns from age to age, when all seems lost, to reaffirm the ideal of integral perfection that the inconceivable Golden Age of our Cycle lived. The majority of the combatants of the French Volunteer Legion were Christians who believed themselves fighting for the accepted values of Western Christian civilization.

Robert Brasillach was profoundly Christian, and he himself realized that we were—and are—“a Church,” and that this Church was and could only be the rival of the one that conquered Europe from the fourth to the twelfth centuries. He apparently preferred, moreover, Italian and especially Spanish Fascism to German National Socialism. It is the social side of the one as the other—the camaraderie, mutual aid, effective solidarity between people of the same fatherland, independently of all “philosophy”—that attracted him. The enthusiasm that this sincerely lived national brotherhood inspired in him, made him close his eyes to the “pagan character” of Hitlerism.

Even among our followers—the Germans who had from the beginning of the Movement followed the Swastika banner—very few comprehended what had occurred not on the political level, but on that of values. Very few realized that it was a spiritual revolution—a negation of the anthropocentric values accepted up to that point by almost all, without discussion, for centuries, and the return of natural values, of the cosmic values of a forgotten civilization—that was to take place before their eyes.

Some comprehended that, felt misled in their initial hopes, and left the Movement, like Hermann Rauschning, or betrayed it (with the tragic consequences we all know). Others—a minority—greeted, and still welcome in this revolution in the field of values precisely that to which they themselves had always more or less consciously aspired. These are the rock on which the Hitlerian Church is built. It will last if they last, i.e., if they are able to transmit their blood and their faith to an uninterrupted succession of Aryan generations, until the end of this Cycle.

* * *

What then are these values that make Hitlerism “a negation of man” in the eyes of almost all our contemporaries? For it is, indeed, a negation of man as Christianity and Descartes and the French Revolution taught us to conceive of him. But isn’t this, on the other hand, the assertion of another conception of man?

One could philosophically define or describe Hitlerism as the quest for the eternal, in and by the love and service of living and tangible perfection. The perfection of a living species is the “idea” of the species in the Platonic sense of the word; or, if one prefers to employ the language of Aristotle, it is its “entelechy”: that which it tends ideally towards. It is certain that, the more complexity a living species has—the more hidden possibilities—the more it is difficult to discover individuals or groups of individuals absolutely faithful to “the idea” of this species, i.e., perfect.

Of all the visible beings of our Earth, the human being presents the widest range of possibilities; it is here that perfection is most difficult to find. And the criterion that allows us—statistically, it goes without saying; in this domain, every truth is a truth of statistical order—to speak about a natural hierarchy of the human races, is the extent to which each race is able to make “the idea of man” a living reality, to present in the faces and bodies of its members the harmony that is the essence of beauty, and in their souls the virtues that distinguish the higher man, whom I have sometimes called “the candidate for Supermanhood.”

I insist on the fact that the idea of a “higher race” is statistical. None us was never stupid enough to believe that all specimens of a human race could be, merely by virtue of their membership in this race, inevitably “superior” to all the specimens of all the other races. There are non-Aryans definitely higher than certain Aryans, even “average” Aryans. Hindu saints of low caste—such as Tukaram—or even below all castes, such Nandanar—were certainly closer to the eternal than many “twice-born” Aryans, especially many Aryans of today, corrupted by the thirst for material goods. The same is true of Japanese heroes such as Yamato Dake or Yashitsune, and so many others; of Mongolian leaders such as Genghis Khan, the invincible genius, or his lieutenant, Subodai, the very incarnation of the highest military virtue and at the same time the most modest, the most disinterested of all men; of the Mexican leaders, such as Nezahualcoyotl, king of Tezcuco, at the same time warrior, engineer, and poet.

And what can be said of Tlahuicol, the Tlaxcalic warrior of the middle of the fifteenth century, who, as prisoner of the Aztecs and destined to be sacrificed at the time of the Festival of Fire, refused the grace and honors that Montezuma I, filled with wonder with the sight of his prowess, offered to him, and preferred “that the festival continue,” with all the horror that would entail for him, rather than to agree to be useful alongside the enemy leaders against Tlaxcala? According to custom, after a solemn entrance, alone and armed only with a sword of wood, he was confronted by five Aztec warriors armed with swords of stone, but he vanquished and killed them—instead of being struck down by them—which earned him the admiration of the prince and all the nobility of Tenochtitlan, whose reception he rejected out of loyalty to his own. Doesn’t he rank definitely above certain Christians, of Aryan origin, his contemporaries in Europe—like Philippe de Commines, for example, traitor to Charles the Bold, his benefactor?

But that is not to say, statistically, that the Aryan is not closer to “the idea of the perfect man” than the man of the other races, even noble, just as within the Aryan race itself, the Nordic is statistically closer to the same “idea” in the Platonic sense of the word. Warlike courage is perhaps one of the virtues most equally distributed at the same time between Aryans and non-Aryans of pure race (or nearly pure). But there are traits that, if they are not exclusively either Aryan or more particularly Nordic, are undoubtedly encountered there more frequently than elsewhere.

I will discuss three of them: physical beauty—which matters as soon as a visible being is spoken of; the fact that one can count on an Aryan, that he does not promise what he cannot give, that he does not lie (or lies less than the majority of the members of other races); and finally, the fact that he has more respect than they, who do not have any, in general, for animals and trees, and more kindness than them towards all the living beings.

And this last feature appears essential to me. Indeed, I cannot regard as “superior” any race—any human community, even if outwardly beautiful and as gifted as possible—if a too high a percentage of the individuals that compose it despise and treat “as mere things” beautiful living beings that by nature cannot take a position “for” or “against” any cause, and that, consequently, one cannot hate. The superior man, the candidate for super-humanity—can neither be the torturer nor even the shameless exploiter of living nature. He will be its admirer—that is to say, its worshipper; he who, to use the words of Alfred Rosenberg, “sees the Divine in all that lives: in the animal; in the plant.”⁵ He can be—he even must be—merciless towards any human enemy of the natural Order with which he has identified himself, and of the beauty of which he is in love. Indeed, far from inflicting pain on an innocent creature, or allowing others to inflict it, directly or indirectly, if he can prevent it, he will do all he can so that any animal he meets lives happily—so that any tree that grows on his path also escapes the innate cruelty of the inferior man, the man ready to sacrifice everything to his own profit, his own comfort, or the profit and comfort his own, even of “humanity.”

Any over-estimation of oneself is a sign of stupidity. Any anthropocentrism is a collective over-estimation of the “self” of the mammal with two legs, all the more flagrant as this self does not exist; there are only the collective “selves” corresponding to each more or less wide and more or less homogenous human group. From which it follows that all anthropocentrism is a sign of double stupidity—and generally of collective stupidity.

Why do some reproach us by saying that we “deny man”? They reproach us for rejecting anthropocentrism. Or they reproach us for placing the concept of the élite—of the aristocracy of living things, human or non-human—above the concept of man, no matter what, and for sacrificing not only the sick to the healthy, the weak to the strong, the deficient to the normal or above normal individual, but even the masses to the élite. One reproaches us for taking the élite of our Aryan race as an end and the masses (all human masses, including those of our Aryan lands) as means. And when I say “masses,” I do not mean the people, but average and below-average humanity, less for what its representatives know than for what they are: for their character and their potentialities. Our Führer came from “the people,” but did not belong to “the masses.”

They reproach our dislike of the botched creature that has irremediably turned its back on the ideal prototype of its race: our horror of the morbid, the deformed, the decadent, all that moves away without return from the crystalline simplicity of elementary form, absolute sincerity, and deep logic. They reproach our militant nostalgia for the time when the visible order of the world accurately reflected the eternal order—the divine order. They reproach our combat for the restoration, no matter what the price, of the reign of eternal values—our combat against the current of Time.

However, as I mentioned above, man is, of all living things on the Earth, the only one where there are, in the midst of the same race, élites and physical, mental, and moral dregs; the only one that, not being strictly defined by its species, can rise (and sometimes does rise) above it until it merges (or almost) with the ideal prototype that transcends it: the superman . . . but that can also lower itself (and lowers itself, in fact, more and more in the age in which we live) below, not only the minimum level of value that one expects to find in his race, but below all living creatures—those prisoners of sure instinct and of practical intelligence put wholly in the service of this instinct that are unable of revolt against the unwritten laws of their being, in other words, to sin.

They reproach us for preferring a healthy and beautiful animal—what am I saying? a healthy and beautiful tree—to a fallen man (one who, born in an inferior race in the process of moving closer and closer to the monkey, does not have any chance of rising towards super-humanity, either for himself or his posterity; or individuals or groups of individuals of higher race, but to whom any possibility of such a rise is definitively prohibited because of physical, psychic, or mental corruption—or all three at once—that they inherited from degenerate ancestors or acquired in consequence of the life that they themselves have lived.

In the Foreword that he wrote for the first French edition of the Tischgespräche [Table Talk] attributed to Adolf Hitler and published under the title of Free Remarks on War and Peace, Count Robert d’ Harcourt recalls that the Führer “loved animals” and that he had, in particular, “written pages of a charming freshness on dogs.”⁶ The French academician contrasts this character trait and this fact with the cynicism of a Head of State, in the eyes of whom political wisdom was “in inverse proportion to humanity”⁷ “Humanity towards animals,” he goes on to say; “bestiality towards men—we knew this mystery of coexistence.” And he adds that those who, in the German concentration camps, sent their victims to the gas chambers, “were the same ones who bandaged, with the gentleness of a nurse, the paw of an injured dog.”⁸

I myself will add to these remarks of an adversary of Hitlerism all that Führer did for animals (and trees), in the spirit of the immemorial Aryan conception of the world: the prohibition of traps, as well as hunting with dogs, and the restriction of hunting of every kind to the degree that it was possible in German society⁹; the suppression of vivisection—this shame of man—and all the atrocities connected with the slaughter of animals for butchering. The use of an automatic pistol was obligatory in all cases, including that of pigs, and I met in Germany a peasant woman who assured me that she had suffered a four year sentence in a concentration camp for killing a pig with a knife (out of cheapness; not to have to pay the man entrusted with slaughtering the animal “without pain”). I will add that, a vegetarian himself, Adolf Hitler dreamed of proceeding step by step, “after the war,” to completely get rid of the horrible industry of the slaughterhouses, even “humanized.” In particular, he declared this to Joseph Goebbels on 26 April 1942.¹⁰

But, far from shocking me by their “contrast” with all the emergency measures taken against human beings held for being actually or potentially dangerous, these laws and these projects appear to me as one of the glories of Third Reich, and one more reason to be proud of my Hitlerian faith.

Count Robert d’ Harcourt represents the “public opinion” of the West in general, Christian as well as rationalist. His point of view is that of all those who fought us, and even some of those who collaborated with us—collaborated for narrowly political reasons, in spite of our “negation of man,” not because of it, in the name of a common scale of values.

They reproach us for “denying man” in placing the least of the healthy animals, the least of the healthy plants—the least of the dandelions, perfect on its level—above human rejects, the mentally retarded, a fortiori above the idiot; in placing the animal or vegetable aristocracy above the Untermensch [sub-human], even the apparently normal one; above the human being without race and character, full of conceit and cowardice; petty; incapable of thinking for himself, and essentially selfish. They reproach us for advocating the physical suppression of the demented, the profoundly “retarded,” the idiots and monsters who, at the expense of the taxpayers, encumber the asylums of the “civilized” countries, and for advocating the sterilization of people afflicted with a dangerous heredity.

They reproach us, perhaps most of all, for allowing German physiologists and doctors to experiment on human beings—enemies of the Reich drawn from the concentration camps—whereas their using animals was defended; in other words, for having higher regard for animals than for actual or even potential ideological enemies. It is that, above all, that the greatest number of our adversaries, stuffed with “de-Nazification” propaganda for more than twenty-five years, are thinking about when they declare that we “deny man.”

It would initially be a question of understanding the connotation (and thus the denotation) of this concept “man,” to which one attaches so great an importance. It is, apparently, the connotation that they lend him that interests our detractors more. They call “man” any primate with an upright stance, capable of articulated language, to which they automatically attribute “reason” and, moreover—if they are Christians—“an immortal soul created in the image of God.” But it is an upright stance and an articulated language—features that leap to the eye—that apparently inform these friends of man of the (less obvious) presence of the other characteristics that according to them would be the object of their solicitude. Consequently the importance they attach to all living things that present these two distinctive features—what am I saying? even those that are deprived of them but have a human form . . . because our adversaries place the idiot above the most beautiful of the animals!

One sees here once more how much it is true that the denotation of a concept is in inverse relation to its connotation. What, at bottom, gives our adversaries the persistent impression that we “deny man” is that we are much more exacting than they are regarding the connotation of this term, thus its denotation, in our eyes, narrows proportionately. Indeed, it is not enough for us to grant to a primate the name of man, and the respect attached to this in the cultivated languages, if this creature prefers to walk on its hind legs and is able to emit articulated sounds having a meaning for it and others. It is not enough for us, with greater reason, if, without presenting these two characteristics, it has a silhouette vaguely similar to one of ours.

We want him to have a minimum of intelligence that will enable him to think for himself, and a minimum of nobility that will make him incapable of certain reactions before obstacles, inaccessible to certain “temptations,” impermeable to certain degrading influences, and a fortiori incapable of petty acts or cowardice; ugly acts. We also want, if not to “love,” at least to respect “all men” for the same reason we respect all beautiful living being, animals and plants, in which we sense reflections, more or less attenuated, of the Divine—of the eternal. But for that, we require that he also act “human” in the strong sense of the word.

We are ready to respect, as individuals, people, ideological adversaries, and even racial enemies whom we have fought collectively yesterday, and whom we will fight again tomorrow—to respect them if, taken individually, they answer to what we expect of “man”: if they combine with a non-servile intelligence, qualities of character that distinguish (statistically) the races that I call superior—and first of all, of course, our Aryan race—and even the exceptionally noble individual of the statistically inferior races. That will not prevent us from fighting them, if they are ideologically dangerous, all the more dangerous as they have greater intrinsic value. In other words, we respect as “men” people who, if they are not ideologically already ours, would be, in our eyes, worthy of becoming so.

* * *

Upon my first new contact with Europe, shortly after the disaster of 1945, I wrote to a Hindu correspondent, after having quoted the phrase of Nietzsche on the intermediate character of man, “suspended between animality and super-humanity”: “The wire is now broken. There are no more men on this God-forsaken continent; there is only a superhuman minority of true Hitlerians, and . . . an immense majority of monkeys.” Such then was contrast between the radiant élite of the faithful, whom I exalted in the first of my post-war books¹¹—“These men of gold and steel, that defeat cannot discourage, that terror and torture cannot break, that money cannot buy”—and the rest of Europeans.

Since then, I have seen this invaluable minority being renewed little by little, while remaining profoundly identical to itself—like the water of a lake fed by a river. Many “old militants”¹² of the glorious years have died, and more than one was weary of awaiting the impossible return of the dawn—or of what he had for so long taken as “a dawn”—of the Aryan rebirth, and, without having died physically, sunk into the apathy of those who no longer hope although hope had been indispensable. Only the Strong remain, who can only hope, because, while contributing by their activity (and the magic fervor of their thought, while their action is prohibited), to the immemorial combat against the Powers of disintegration, they have transcended Time. Only those remained upright who do not need “to believe,” because they Know.

And around some of the survivors of the wreckage of the most beautiful of races, I have seen, during this quarter century, assembling—consciously or not, it does not matter—a hard and quiet élite of young people; a far from numerous élite, undoubtedly, but—o joy!—of a quality that the vast hostile world does not suspect (and that would under no circumstances change even if, one day, change were suddenly thrust upon them).

I have seen growing, here and there, out of what could seem to the eyes of a historian our final ruin, the miraculous fruits of an unparalleled ordeal: boys and girls of twenty already strong enough to live without hope or success; intelligent enough to comprehend once and for all that the Truth does not depend on the visible.

One of them¹³ said to me, in 1956, and others repeated it to me, more than ten years later: “I oppose, and will continue all my life to oppose, the current decline, persuaded as I am of the eternity of the Hitlerian ideal, although I know that we will no longer see, until the end of time, the equivalent of the Third German Reich. It is necessary to fight without ceasing and without failure, even while knowing in advance that we will be overcome; to fight, because it is the duty—the function—of an Aryan in our time, and in all times to come.”

I then thought of the words of Goebbels, flung into the midst of all the horror of the disaster: “After the deluge, we!” Was this the nature of this disaster, to give birth to—on the continent whose false civilization destines it, and how justly!, to be swept away—some young people (German for the most part, but not necessarily) whose spontaneous mentality, corresponding exactly to the teaching of Bhagavad-Gita, returns to that of the very prototype of the Aryan of old? And would the resurrection, in our time, of the ethics of imperturbable inner serenity even in the midst of untiring action—of the wisdom of the divine Warrior—have to result from the Passion of Germany? Perhaps.

If it is so, it was worth the sorrow to survive the disaster, to be the witness of this resurrection. It was worth the sorrow of wandering year after year among all the monkeys of the “consumer societies,” to ensure oneself finally, more and more, that the spirit of the Leader and Master would not be eclipsed with the death of the last militants of the old guard, but would continue to animate, in its hardness and purity, an aristocracy, simultaneously spiritual and racial, that had not been born in 1945.

This spiritual and racial aristocracy, this élite, conscious of the eternity of the fundamental principles of the doctrine of Adolf Hitler, and living according to them in all simplicity, here, for us, is “true man”; the man who tends toward super-humanity by personal and collective discipline, the selection of blood, the culture of ancestral honor, and the divine indifference to all that is not essential; by the humility of the individual before the Race and before the eternity that it reflects; by the contempt of all cowardice, of all lies, and all weakness.

And I repeat: if we discover some of these characteristics elsewhere than in those who confess openly or in secret the same doctrines as we; even if we find them among people who fight and hate us, or believe they hate us because they do not know us—we salute, in those who have them, beings worthy of respect. They have in them the stuff of what they could be and are supposed to be, but they do not use it or use it badly. They are, most of the time, our own brothers in race, or even men of other races, among the more gifted.

Something in them redeems them before the immanent and impersonal Justice that sends each being that, rightly or wrongly, claims to think, where it deserves to go, and that has up to now prevented them—and will always prevent a number of them—from slipping and falling into the masses that do not think or feel according to their own law; into the simian majority of humanity that, like liquids or doughy substances, takes the shape of the receptacles that contain it, or the mark of the seal that has, once and for all, stamped it.

I have, during this quarter century, little by little rediscovered this category of people that my atrocious shock at post-war Europe had initially hidden from my attention: men of goodwill; good people who keep their word and are capable of good deeds that do not bring anything back to them; who, for example, would leave their path to help an animal, without, for all that, being capable of extreme sacrifices, even of action sustained daily, always, for the benefit of anyone. They are not the Strong—and certainly not “one of us.” But they are not “monkeys.” In an intelligent sorting, they would have to be saved. Among their children could be future militants of Hitlerism—or its opposite. A reading, a conversation at a crucial time, anything can decide the evolution of each one of them. One must be prudent:  not to scorn what is healthy, but neither to waste one’s time and energy trying prevent one who is, in any event, predestined—condemned  by nature—to sink into the unthinking masses; sometimes “useful” masses, but never respectable and a fortiori never loveable.

It is not “man” in the sense we mean—the man who is a viable candidate for true super-humanity; nor is he the “good man,” healthy in body and soul, fundamentally honest and good, well disposed to all that lives—whom we “deny.” In other words, it is not he to whom we refuse to grant more “dignity” and give more consideration than a simple thing; not him, but this caricature of man, more and more common in the world in which we live. It is he whom we refuse to include in the denotation of the concept “man,” for the simple reason that he does not have the connotation of it, i.e., he does not have the essential qualities and capacities that are used quite naturally as attributes in the possible judgments where the word “man” is used as the subject.

Any judgment, in which a concept is employed as the subject is inevitably a hypothetical judgment. To say that “man thinks,” or that he is a “thinking being,” is to say that if an unspecified individual is “a man”—has an upright stance, language, etc.—it follows that he is also able to think. If he were not capable of it, then an upright stance and articulated speech, and the other features that accompany those, do not suffice to define him, and do not oblige anybody to treat him, as a “man.”

However, an individual does not think if he tells you, with all seriousness, that information is “certainly true” because it was transmitted to him by his television, or especially that a value judgment must “certainly” be accepted because he himself has read it in a newspaper, a magazine, or a book, or on a poster, it does not matter where, provided that it is in some sort of print! He “does not think” any more than a gramophone whose needle accurately follows the spiral engraved on a disc. Change the disc, and the machine will change its language—or music.

In the same way, change the television broadcasts that millions of families follow every evening with their ears and eyes; change the radio programs; pay the press so that it prints different propaganda; and encourage the publication of other magazines and books, and in three months you will change the reactions of a people—of all peoples—to the same events, the same political or literary personalities, the same ideas.

Why, great Gods, should we treat as “men”—as “thinking reeds”—these millions of gramophones of flesh and blood that “do not think” any more than their metal and plastic colleagues? Those cannot think, and it would be absurd to ask them. They have neither brains nor nerves. They are objects.

The individual—the two-legged mammal—who comes to tell me of the murder of “six million” Jews—men, women, and children, who found death in the gas chambers of German concentration camps—and who is annoyed if I show him that this number has one zero too many (or perhaps even two), is worse than an object. He has a brain, but does not make use of it, or only makes use of it to stupefy himself more each day, by refusing any chance to exert what little critical spirit he still has after more than forty years of anti-Hitlerian conditioning (this kind of propaganda started already before 1933; between 1920 and 1930. I was then in Europe and I remember—and how!).

Moreover, he has the impertinence to find fault with others, or with men of the past, for “blind faith”—absolute confidence in a teaching or a master. He blames people of “the Middle Ages” (or mocks them) because they believed without question all that the Church told them and all that is written in the Gospels, as if the authority of the Church and the Gospels were not worth that of the television, or magazines like Match—or Bild. He refuses to admit, because the propaganda he has swallowed told him the opposite, that we—at least those among us who count—are not, never were, “conditioned.”

Why, then, accord him more “respect” than an object—especially since, precisely since he is nearly perfectly indoctrinated, he has become for me—for the cause that I serve—completely useless? And if, moreover, he is not even good? If I know, having seen him in action, that he would not hesitate to tear a branch off of a tree that is inconvenient, or throw a stone at a dog? Why—in the name of what—would I believe myself obligated to “prefer” him to the dog he wounded one day, or the tree he mutilated while passing? In the name of his “human dignity”? A fine dignity: that of a living and pernicious—dangerous—gramophone; able gratuitously to inflict suffering and create ugliness! I deny it, this “dignity.”

Will it be said that I must love him “because he is my brother”? The tree and the dog and all living beings, beautiful and innocent, that at least do not have any ideas, neither their own nor those of the television, are my brothers. By no means do I feel that this individual is more my brother than the rest of them. Why, then, would I give him priority over them? Because he walks—like me—on his hind legs? That is not, in my eyes, a sufficient reason. I mock an upright stance when it is not paired with true thought and the true character of a superior man; a character from which any spite, any smallness, is excluded. And when articulated speech is used only to express ideas that were neither created nor discovered by their adherents, but received just as they are, ready made—and false ones at that—I  prefer, by far, the silence of the animals and trees.

⁷ Ibid, Foreword, xxiii.

⁸ Ibid, Foreword, xxii-xxiii.

⁹ Reichsjagdgesetz, or the complete collection of the laws promulgated under the Third Reich concerning hunting.

¹⁰ The Goebbels Diaries, published after the war (in l948) by the occupation authorities in Germany (American Eagle Books), trans. L. Lockner, 220.