by Savitri Devi

Chapter 8 of Souveniers et réflexions d'une Aryenne
(Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Woman)

Translated by R.G. Fowler

Illustration: Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin

“In every age that justice is in danger, O Bharata,
and that injustice is exalted,
then, I Myself return.
For the protection of the good,
for the destruction of the evil,
and the establishment of a reign of justice,
I reappear age after age.”

—The Bhagavad-Gita, IV, verses 7 and 8

In fact, the obvious difference in “style,” as in spirit, that separates the great collective demonstrations of the Hitlerian faith, under the Third Reich, from, on the one hand, the parallel expressions of Marxism in Russia (or China) and, with greater reason, from the disorderly marches of slovenly young people of the “New Left,” and, on the other hand, from the official parades of liberal plutocracies, reveals a fundamental opposition of nature: the opposition between the Tradition and the Anti-tradition, to employ the language of René Guénon or Evola.

I have, from the very beginning of these discussions, tried to show that “political” doctrines obviously can, sometimes, be used as the basis for a religion, provided that it is associated with rites—i.e., with symbolism—and that it becomes, for the whole of its adherents, an object of faith. But I must point out that it can be used as the foundation of a true religion only if the propositions on which it is supported are expressions of eternal truths, or justify themselves only in the light of such truths, in other words, are legitimately attached to the Tradition. A true religion is the ensemble of the beliefs and the symbolic gestures—rites and customs related to these beliefs—that, in a “traditional civilization,” give expression to its consciousness of the sacred. Furthermore, a “traditional civilization” is, according to René Guénon, “one that rests on principles in the true sense of the word, i.e., where the intellectual order dominates all others, where all proceed directly or indirectly and, be they sciences or social institutions, are ultimately nothing more than contingent, secondary, and subordinate implementations of intellectual truths.”¹ And it is good to add that what the sage understands here by “purely intellectual truths” and the “intellectual order” are the very laws of the universal existence, manifest or non-manifest, and the permanent order behind all that changes; the eternal.

It is hardly necessary to stress that the “values” and “truths” nominally exalted in the civic solemnities of the Democracies of the West—and even in the lay education given to the young people of these so-called Democracies—not only form no part of any specific form of the Tradition, but no longer have, even as mere words, sufficient resonances to raise the shadow of any powerful anti-traditional system—to say nothing about “false religion,” i.e., religion based on a deliberate negation of the Tradition: a counter-initiation. No. If an ever more relentless encroachment of technology brings the world of the plutocracies closer to the communist world to the point that one can, theoretically at least, say that there is nothing to choose between the two, there is nevertheless a difference between them. The world of the plutocracies (and their satellites) has no faith, and is not attached (not for a long time already) to any vision, beyond the sensible and changing. If some individuals or groups of individuals still have a knowledge of the eternal there, they no longer have any influence on the whole of society; they keep silent, and wait, at most endeavouring to remain themselves and to recognize one another. The masses there are abandoned to dissipation in the greyness of the trivial worries and quotidian pleasures. They are not forced to do anything at all. In addition, of the old faith of their Churches, they retained only a veneer of conformism, which is more and more exhausted, and the anthropocentrism common to any teaching invented by Jews for Aryan consumption. The élites, or so-called élites, except for some individuals, hardly retain it any more.

The West lives off its capital—but for how much longer?

Emptied of any will to power, refusing any risk, cursing any aggressiveness (save what it itself deployed, from 1939 to 1945—and beyond with its efforts to “de-Nazify” Germany—against the only people and the only faith that could have brought it to an extraordinary rectification), it lets itself slip into a comfortable degradation, it sinks into a precarious well-being, it is mechanized, Americanized, proletarianized, until one day it falls of its own accord—following increasing infiltrations of ideas and . . . of agents who are all the more efficient as they are quieter—under the domiance of the communist world, or becomes, by right of conquest, an integral part of it.

But, although it is true that liberal Democracy, with its superstitions of universal suffrage, of compusory primary (and soon secondary!) education, and of generalized vaccination—in other words, with its worship of equality and quantity—leads straight to Marxism, it is not Marxism. The decadence over which it presides is totally pervaded, certainly, by a markedly anti-traditional spirit—all decadence is; it is its very essence. But it represents a natural process, a sign of senility, at most encouraged by certain conscious agents of the dark Forces, working silently in high places in the direction of the anti-tradition. It is not related to systematic efforts of deliberate subversion of the traditional order, cooly coordinated over a long time and masterfully directed, like those that Marxist zealots have, if not caused, at least accelerated in all the countries where they seized power.

In other words, there is, between the so-called “free” world, with its disillusioned élites and its multitudes aspiring only to facile happiness and immediate success, and the communist world, with its savagely disciplined masses, dominated by leaders of which some—like Lenin, Stalin, or Mao Tse-Tung—will leave an indelible mark on history (and of which the most powerful are not necessarily the best known), a close analogy to a man who lets himself live, without faith, without any impulse beyond the domain of the senses, without participation in any rite, and a man who attends black masses. It is the difference between the absence of any inclination towards initiatory development and a real counter-initiation. And it is precisely for this reason that “the small margin of material freedom that the world of democracy still grants, in some activities . . . to one who will not let himself be conditioned inwardly” . . . “certainly disappears under a Communist regime.”² A society without order is, it goes without saying, less intolerant in practice than a society built on a “reverse” order—or a society in which the structure reflects the true Order.

* * *

I have already insisted on the untruth at the base of Marxism, namely the assertion that man is reducible to a product of his economic environment. I will not revisit it. It is sufficient for me to stress the anti-natural character—contrary to the fundamental law of all manifestation—of the approach that consists in presenting a being as the product of something that is external to him and that does not interest him in any case; that in him which is less essential, less specifically “his”; metaphysically speaking, the less permanent: his needs and physical comfort. Such an approach would be, from the point of view of the universal order, just as absurd with regard to animals—or plants—as man. No being could be reduced to its appearance and its most material functions, and even less to the result of the action of the “economic environment,” i.e., in the last analysis, the possibilities of nutrition, on this appearance—and on these functions. The least of the plants draws its existence from what is permanent—the eternal—in the seed from which it sprouts. The environment can, certainly, help it to develop, or, on the contrary, to impede it; it cannot make it become what it is not—to change a buttercup into dandelion or vice versa—no more than it can destroy what is permanent in a man, in the visible world and beyond, i.e., his physical and psychic heredity: his race.

No one is mad enough to deny the influence of the environment on the life of a man: on his occupations; on the occasions he has or lacks to realize some of his possibilities. But to reduce his being to the “result of environmental influences,” and especially only the “economic” environment, and, in addition, to build a whole political philosophy on this veritable reversal of the process of passage from essence to existence, is to propose to men of action a wisdom in reverse, in other words, an inversion of original and impersonal cosmic Wisdom. It is thus to do anti-traditional work.

Sufficient proof, if proof were necessary, are the few words that summarize, with blinding clarity, the method and the goal of the Marxists:  “class struggle” and “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Granted, in the late Dark Age in which we have already lived for a long time, the “classes” have lost their significance. They lost it insofar as they no longer correspond to castes, i.e., insofar as they less and less represent true differences in character and aptitudes between the people who compose them, differences related to heredity. Thus it is not entirely bad—it is even extremely desirable—that they disappear in a total recasting of society—a recasting that would tend to restore the ideal order as much as possible. It is, for whoever wants to oppose the general decadence—that only the fanatics of “progress” refuse to see all around us—particularly urgent to put an end to the scandal of purchasable privileges. This state of affairs did not begin yesterday. It was, it seems, founded in Western Europe—in France at least—in the sixteenth century, with the first acquisitions of titles of nobility for money. It was sanctioned, and strengthened, by the Revolution of 1789, made (partly) by the people, but for the profit of the bourgeoisie and under its direction, the Revolution whose result was to replace power derived solely from birth with power granted solely by money. Nothing could be more urgent than to change that. Not that the rich man is blameworthy in himself because he grew rich, or his rich parents bequeathed their fortune to him. It is by no means necessary, of course, that his money was acquired by the exploitation of misery or vice, i.e., to the detriment of the community. But he becomes blameworthy as soon as he thinks that this money gives him other rights than those arising from the qualities and capacities inherited with his blood and thus inherent in his being. He becomes blameworthy if he imagines himself able legitimately to buy everything with this money, including the responsibility for the command and obedience of his compatriots. In a word, there is no need to “fight,” even less to abolish, the bourgeoisie, or the aristocracy, or the working class or peasantry. All have their raison d'être and their role. It is only necessary to take care that every man really is in his place, and remains there.

From the point of view of this ideal order which reflects and symbolizes the intangible hierarchy of the states of Being—from the point of view of the eternal—the idea of “class struggle” for the sake of political power is thus nonsense. Power should be with the hands of the best—the “aristoi”—i.e., those who are worthy and able to exercise it. And if the fact of losing it always reveals some lack or failure, and even, sometimes, some deep unworthiness, regarding he who would seize it, it does not follow that it is enough to usurp it to become worthy of it. “Class struggle” is conceivable precisely only at a time when the “classes” are no longer distinguishable from each other, except by what they have, and not by what they are. It is not, in other words, conceivable, unless it is property alone, or property above all, that determines the artificial “being” of each class, instead of that which constitutes its true being, i.e., the physical and psychic heredity of its members, which determines what they have the right to possess; unless, I repeat, the “classes” no longer correspond to their respective castes.

“Struggle”—“combat”; I will return to this later, in connection with something completely different from Marxism—then becomes the only means of establishing a certain order within a society that no longer has any connection with eternal principles. There is inevitably violence—struggle—when these principles are ignored in the visible world. It has been so since the end of the Age of Truth.³ It is the sense which one gives to this fight—for or against the ideal Order—that, in the final analysis, justifies or condemns it.

However, for the Marxists it should lead to what they call the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in other words, to the passage of power into the hands of the masses, i.e., the people who are least qualified to exercise it. It tends therefore toward a complete inversion of the social hierarchy such as it was in all times when it reflected, even distantly—or showed some inclination to reflect—the eternal order. That alone should suffice to characterize Marxism as a philosophy in reverse; and to grasp its effort to eradicate existing elites and reduce the masses themselves to the state of a human magma increasingly easy “to condition” thus to manipulate, in the direction of economic production exclusively, for a diabolical enterprise.

* * *

The present Cycle being much closer to its end than to its luminous beginning, undoubtedly this is not the first time that such an enterprise has taken place. Above I mentioned the Revolution of 1789, which, on behalf of the idea of equality “of rights” of all men of all races, led, in France—in fact—to the usurpation of power by the bourgoisie, and, in a West geographically so much more remote, to the creation of the grotesque Negro republic of Santo Domingo. I could have mentioned Christianity itself, in spite of the undeniable, but obviously limited, share of true universal symbolism that it can contain. Doesn't its diffusion, on behalf of this same idea of equality, as subversive as it is erroneous, complete the disintegration of the Greco-Roman World (already started, admittedly, in the Hellenistic era)? And in any case its outrageous anthropocentrism makes it an incomplete religion. The European aristocracy, i.e., Germanic, and the Byzantine, or the Byzantinized Slavic aristocracy, accommodated it politically, making use of it as an ever-ready pretext for proselytizing conquests and and as a unifying force for conquered peoples; while in addition some their more eminent members found in it the occasion of a pure spiritual, if not physical masochism.⁴ In the final analysis, and in spite of the inspiration that so many artists drew from it, its practical consequences have been, in the precise sense of the word, more subversive than constructive.

I could have mentioned any of these wisdoms, always more or less truncated, that Nietzsche calls “religions of slaves.” For all these, even, and perhaps especially those that place themselves most ostensibly “above Time,” by the sole fact that they deny hierarchy, be it only in society and not in oneself, and do not take any account of race under the pretext that the visible has little importance, lead in practice to an encouragement of levelling down⁵ and thus constitute (in practice, always) factors of disintegration acting in the direction of Time. They all contribute to the vast work of subversion, in the proper sense of the term—the reversal of the ideal order—which continues, while intensifying, during the whole course of the cycle.

I will say more. Undoubtedly there is “subversion” of this principal kind every time a man, or a natural group of men—a caste; a race—motivated by a false estimate of its “rights” (or even its “duties”) usurps or tries to usurp the normal place of another; any time, for example, that a prince rejects the spiritual authority to which his kingdom, and perhaps his civilization, owes its bond—even distant and tenuous—with the most hidden and high sources of the Tradition. It is a crime of this nature that Philip the Fair, otherwise a great king, seems have committed by destroying, with the complicity of a pope who was more politician than priest, the Order of the Knights of the Temple. But all that does nothing but prepare and prefigure, more or less, the ultimate subversion: calling the masses—and the masses of all races; the “world proletariat”—to power; and what is worse, pretending to derive from it, and it alone, the principle and the justification of power.

This subversion—that Guénon calls “the reign of the Sudra”—is the worst of all those that follow one another in the course of the ages. It is the worst one, not because a non-Marxist would find himself suffering greater disadvantages under a Communist regime than under another, but above all because with it, it is a matter not merely of arbitrary changes, contrary to the spirit of the true hierarchy within visible society, but of the total inversion of ideal situations and essential values.Consequently, this society, instead of tending, as it should, to reflect what it can of the eternal order, reflects, symbolizes, concretizes in the world of manifestation, exactly the opposite. The pyramid which illustrates, in the supra-rational vision of the wise, the organic hierarchy of ideal society, the image of the hierarchical states of cosmic existence, visible and invisible, is in the sacrilegous dream of the Marxist, completely inverted. It is set in balance—oh, how very unstable!—on what should be, on what, from the point of view of formal correspondences, is, its summit. And its natural basis is made its artificial summit; a “summit” which is not one, because it is, precisely, mass—formless and ponderous mass; mass crushing, overwhelming all—and not apex.

It is from the metaphysical point of view that Marxism is nonsense, whatever may be the deceptive subtlety of the arguments with which its founder, Mardoccai, known as Marx, tried to support it, starting from economic and political considerations concerning production, the profit of the employer, the wages of the workman, “surplus value,” etc. . . . No dialectic can put a doctrine in accord with cosmic truth, if it is not so already. And (in the practical domain, this time) no force of coercion or persuasion, or conditioning, can, in the long run, stabilize, in the course of a cycle, a specific state of deterioration. The social pyramid cannot remain indefinitely in precarious balance on its summit, its basis in the air. Or a “partial rectification” will tend to give it balance—with an increasingly illusory and, moreover, less and less durable success as the cycle approaches its end; or the pyramid, dragged by the inertia of the very ones that one wanted to make the “summit,” will crumble, disintergrate, scatter in fragments. And following order in reverse there will be chaos, complete anarchy. It will be—to imitate the picturesque language, colored by Hinduism, of the author of the Crisis of the Modern World⁶—the reign of the Chandala succeeding the reign of Soudra; the end of the cycle.

(Perhaps we have an albeit sporadic preview of this in a few demonstrations of gregarious eccentricity and noisy nihilism, such as those of the “Existentialists of Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” of the young people of the “New Left,” or the “hippies” of all strands—anarchists out of indolence; pacifists out of weakness, drug addicts, badly washed, uncombed, noisy, scruffy—individualistic and tolerant as long as the individuality of their neighbor does not obstruct them; preaching: “Make love; not war!” and ready to pounce on the first one who prefers to make war—or one and the other.)

* * *

There is no lack of adversaries of Marxism. There are all kinds, from those who condemn any violence and are frightened by the known episodes of “class struggle” both in Russia and China, to those who reproach the Communists for their atheism and their materialism, not to mention those who possess something they are afraid to lose if they had to live under the sign of the Hammer and Sickle.

Many oppose it in the name of some political doctrine—generally incarnated in a “party”—which, though it attacks the “subversive” character of Marxism, is itself no less subversive in the same sense and for the same profound reasons. This is the case with the members of all democratic parties, whose common denominator is to be sought in the belief in the “equal rights” of all men, and therefore, in the principle of universal suffrage; power comes from the majority. These people do not realize that Communism is implicit in this very principle, as it was it already in Christian anthropocentrism (even though it is the value of human souls, in the eyes of a personal God who loves all men infinitely). They do not realize that this is the case, and can only be the case, for the reason that the majority will always be the masses—and more and more so, in an over-populated world.

The only ones who oppose Marxism deeply and fundamentally are those faithful to any adequate expression of the immemorial Tradition, in particular the adherents of any true religion, or any Weltanschauung capable of serving as the basis of a true religion, i.e., any Weltanschauung also based, in final analysis, on knowledge of the eternal and the will to make it the principle of socio-political order.

However, while spurning the appearance of paradox that such an assertion undoubtedly takes on, twenty-five years after the fall of the Third German Reich, I dare to repeat that the sole properly Western doctrine (after the very old nordic religions, that Christianity persecuted and little by little killed, between the sixth and twelfth centuries) that meets this condition, is Hitlerism—the sole Weltanschauung, infinitely more than “political,” that is clearly “against Time”: in agreement with the eternal. Thus it will be the only one that, in the long run, will triumph over both Marxism and the generalized chaos to which it will have brought the world—regardless of the magnitude of yesterday’s defeat of its faithful on the material plane, and regardless of the hostility of millions of men to them today. Indeed, only a total rectification can succeed total subversion; a glorious beginning of a cycle, a lamentable end of a cycle.

But our adversaries will not fail to draw everyone’s attention to the “anti-traditional” character of more than one aspect of National Socialism during the Kampfzeit, before 1933—as well as after the seizure of power. If, they will say, it is “subversive” from the point of view of eternal values to preach “class struggle” with a view “dictatorship of the proletariat,” was it not just as subversive to rise to power “democratically”—thanks to universal suffrage—and what is more, to depend upon, through a whole succession of electoral campaigns, the protection of young fighters, for the most part as “proletarian” in their behavior as the Communists whose attacks they repelled during their meetings and whom they crushed in street battles? Wasn’t it subversive to keep this power, coming, in fact, from the people—the masses—and to omit to restore the old monarchy, in spite of the last and fervent recommendation of Marshal von Hindenburg, President of the Reich? Was it not subversive also, moreover, to accept subsidies for the NSDAP from many German banks⁷ and industrial magnates,⁸ thus making the success of the National Socialist revolution dependent in part on the power of money and risking, in this case, making it seem, in spite of its popular allure, the supreme defense of the status quo of the “capitalist” order, i.e., of a society extremely far from the traditional ideal? Finally, they will still ask how can one deny that, even after the seizure of power, the Third German Reich looked far different from an organic body inspired from top to bottom by a vision of the cosmic hierarchy? The famous author Hans Günther himelf, apparently disillusioned, wrote to me in 1970⁹ that unfortunately it seemed to him “an ochlocracy,” rather than the aristocratic regime of which he had dreamed. And one cannot categorically reject without discussion this judgment of the one of the best known theorists of Hitlerian racism before the disaster of 1945. The judgment, while without a doubt being excessive, must certainly express more than a few scattered instances of a regrettable reality.

Let us never forget that we are approaching the end of a cycle, thus the best of institutions would only rarely resemble the perfection of those of the past. Because everywhere there are—and the post-war period amply proves it—more and more two-legged mammals and fewer and fewer men to the strong sense of the word. Thus one should judge no doctrine by what is accomplished in the visible world in its name. A doctrine is true or false according to whether or not it is in unison with the direct knowledge of the universal and eternal possessed only by a constantly decreasing minority of sages. It is true or false—it can never be repeated enough—independently of the victory or the defeat of its devotees, or so-called devotees, on the material plane, and their weaknesses, their stupidity, even their crimes. Neither the atrocities of the Holy Inquisition nor the scandals attached to the name of Pope Alexander VI Borgia, remove any part of the truth of the vision of the “intelligible world” available through Christian symbolism to a Meister Eckhart, for example, or some Templar initiate. And the same applies to all doctrines.

Thus one must take care not to charge Hitlerism with the faults, weaknesses, or excesses of affluent, powerful people, to the extent that these ills existed under Third Reich or during the period of struggle (Kampfzeit) of 1920 to 1933, and above all faults or excesses against the spirit of the “Weltanschauung” and against the dream of the Führer, as there had been, it seems, so many. One must see, in German society as it was under the increasing influence, then under the effective government, of the Führer, during the Kampfzeit and after, only the efforts of this one, destined to mould it according to his dream, or to prevent it from evolving against this same dream.

 It is necessary to try to understand what he wanted to do.

Already in the official National Socialist texts addressed to the general public—in the Twenty-five Points, which form the basis of the program of the Party; and especially in Mein Kampf where the great philosophical Directives of this one are traced with still more clarity—one can see that the Movement was directed against the most cherished ideas and characteristic usages of an eminently decadent society, resulting from the Liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Loans with interest, financial speculation, and any manner of profit foreign to creative effort, as well as the exploitation of vice and stupidity by a press, a literature, a cinema, a theater considered above all as means to make profits, are condemned there with utmost rigor. Much more: the very principles of modern Western civilization—the equal rights of all men and all human races; the idea that the “right” is the expression of the will of the majority; the idea of the “nation” as a community of those who, whatever their origin, “wish to live together”; the idea that perpetual peace in abundance, fruit of the “victory of the man over nature,” represents the supreme good—are attacked, ridiculed, demolished there in a masterly way. The natural law—the law of the struggle for survival—is recognized and exalted on the human plane as on all the others. And the primordial importance of race and personality—these two pillars of the new faith—are proclaimed there on every page. Finally, this new faith, or rather this new conception of life (neue Aufassung)—because it functions, for the Führer and a few others, not as a “faith,” but as true knowledge—is clearly characterized there as “corresponding with the original sense of things,”¹⁰ which speaks volumes, this “original sense of things” being none other than that which they grasp in the light of the Tradition.

One can thus, without going any further, affirm that everything in the history of the National Socialist Party that seems not to coincide with the spirit of combat “against Time” concerns the tactics of combat, not its nature, not its goal. It was under the pressure of hard necessity, and only after having failed, on 9 November 1923, in his attempt to seize power by force, that Adolf Hitler, having been released from the prison of Landsberg but deprived henceforth of any means of action—against his heart, certainly—had recourse to slow and long “legal channels,” i.e., to the reiterated appeal to the voters, and the gradual conquest of a majority in the Reichstag. Everyone knows that his first gesture after taking power “by democratic means” was to replace at all the levels the authority of the majority with that of one alone, namely him; in other words to abolish democracy—to return, as far as possible, the political order to agreement with the natural order.

It was under the pressure of a material need no less compelling—facing up to the enormous expenditure implied by the struggle for power within the framework of a parliamentary regime, with its inevitable electoral campaigns—that he had to accept the assistance of Hugenberg, Kirkdorf, Thyssen, Doctor Schacht, and later of Krupp, and a number of other industrialists and bankers. Without it, he could not have risen to power quickly enough to bar the road to the most dangerous forces of subversion: the Communists. Because money is, more than ever, in a world which it dominates more and more, the “sinews of war” . . . and of politics. Does that mean that the Führer was controlled by money or those who had given it to him during the Kampfzeit? Does that mean that he made them the least concession after the seizure of power? Far from it! He enabled them to grow rich insofar as, by doing so, they effectively served the nation's economy and gave the working masses what he himself had promised them: abundance thanks to work; insofar as, subject to his authority, they continued to help the Party—i.e., the State—in peace and in war. He kept them in their place and in their role—like a king with the “caste” of merchants in a traditional society—showing thereby both his realism and his wisdom.

In addition, the—at least partial—“ochlocracy” that has so often been counted against National Socialism, was in fact only the inevitable corollary of the costs Adolf Hitler incurred in reaching power—quite democratically—courtesy of the majority of the voters. It would not have existed if the Putsch of 9 November 1923 had succeeded, and had given him a free hand to reforge Germany according to its boundless dream. It would not have existed, because then he would not have needed the collaboration of hundreds of thousands of young people, ready for everything—to strike blows, as well as receive some—to maintain, all around his massive propaganda meetings, and in the rooms themselves, an order constantly threatened by the physical attacks of the most violent, the most implacable elements of the Communist opposition. To conquer Germany “democratically,” it was necessary for him to show himself, and make himself understood, hundreds and hundreds of times; to transmit his message to the public: part of his message, at least what would encourage the masses to vote for his party. The message was irresistible. Still it was necessary to make it known. And that was impossible without the pack of wolves—the “SA”¹¹—the mistress of the street, who, in peril of its life, assured the Führer silence and safety in the midst of his audience.

Adolf Hitler loved his young lions, who were passionately attached to his person, avid at the same time for violence and adoration, of whom more than one was a former Communist that the fascination of his word, his gaze, his behavior no less than his doctrines—in which the son of the proletariat divined something more outrageous, more brutal, therefore more exciting than Marxism—had won to the holy Cause. He loved them. And he loved the latest to date of their supreme leaders of the Kampfzeit, Ernst Röhm, under whose command he himself had been during the war; Ernst Röhm returned from Bolivia—the end of the world—to answer his appeal.¹² He willingly closed his eyes to Röhm’s deplorable morals to see in him only the perfect soldier and the organizer of genius. And yet . . . he, despite everything, resigned himself to kill him, or let him be killed, this old companion in struggle—almost the only man of his entourage whom he addressed as “du”¹³—as well as many less important leaders of the SA, as soon as he was persuaded that the turbulence of this troop, however faithful it may have been, its spirit of independence, and above all the growing opposition between it and the regular German army—Röhm’s more or less disguised ambition to make it, from henceforth, the only German army—could precisely lead only to ochlocracy, if not civil war, in any case to the weakening of Germany.

One could compare this tragic but apparently necessary “purge,” of 30 June 1934, to the most Machiavellian settlings of scores in history, for example, of the execution without trial of Don Ramiro di Lorqua, on order of Cesarse Borgia—with this capital difference, however, the Duke of Valentino kept in mind only power for himself, while the Führer aimed infinitely higher. He wanted the power to try, in a desperate effort, to reverse the course of Time, on behalf of eternal values. There was nothing personal in his combat, including any stage of this one.

And if he had, despite the enthusiastic desire of the Marshal and President of Reich, von Hindenburg, rejected any idea of restoration of the monarchy, it was not out of ambition either. It is because he was conscious of the vanity of such a step, on the plane of values and true hierarchies. The monarchy “from divine right,” the only standard from the traditional point of view,¹⁴ had already for centuries lost all meaning and justification in Europe. The Führer knew it. To him, it accomplished nothing to try to restore a faltering order, by reinstalling a parliamentary monarchy chaired (there is no other word) by Wilhelm II or one of his sons. He wanted to build a new order, or rather to bring back the most ancient order, the “original” order, in the most vigorous and most durable form that he could assume in this century. And he knew that, by the choice of those Forces of life that, throughout a temporal cycle, whatever stage it may be, are opposed untiringly to the ineluectable current of dissolution, he himself held—He, the eternal Siegfried, at the same time human and more than human—the legitimate power in this visible world and the legitimate authority emanating from beyond; the “power of the two Keys.” With him at its summit, the pyramid of the terrestrial hierarchies was little by little to regain its natural position, starting to reappear in miniature, in Germany initially, then in all Europe and then in the whole Aryan world, the invisible Order that the Cosmos depicts on a grand scale.

It is on behalf of this imposing vision of ideal correspondences that he rejected, with equal vigor, Marxism, the doctrine of total subversion; Parliamentarism in all its forms, always based on the same superstition of quantity; and ochlocracy, source of disorder, therefore of constant instability.

But the traditional character of his wisdom is to be sought much more still in the few texts which relay his secret or at least intimate conversations to us—his confidences, with an open heart, before a few select people—than in his writings or speeches that are addressed to the general public.

* * *

The “Tischgespräche” [Table Talk], conversations of the Führer with some senior Party officials, senior SS officers, or foreign guests,¹⁵ are instructive in this regard. Even more still, perhaps, are certain reports hostile to Hitlerism, all the more virulent since their authors reproached themselves for following Adolf Hitler and felt stupid in  retrospect—wrongly, undoubtedly; because it would have been quite difficult to grasp the true thought of the Master before belonging to the narrow circle of people who enjoyed his confidence. Such as, for example, the book of the former President of the Senate of the Free City of Danzig, Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, which had some notoriety in its time, since by 1939 the thirteenth French printing had already appeared—an excellent book, in spite of the aggressiveness that comes through in every line.¹⁶ Because Rauschning seems himself completely ignorant of the cyclical conception of history and, in a general manner, of the supra-human truths that are at the basis of all ancient wisdoms, this renders all the more eloquent the judgments that he believes count against the Führer by showing him (unbeknownst to Rauschning) carrying out his combat precisely on behalf of these truths. Finally, nothing can clarify certain aspects of Hitlerism like Hans Grimm’s book Warum? Woher? aber Wohin?, the work of an impartial non-Hitlerian, or the account that Auguste Kubizek, a man without any political allegiance, gives of the years of friendship which he experienced with the future Führer, then aged from fifteen to nineteen years, in its book Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund.¹⁷

The first thing that strikes one reading of these various texts is the consciousness that Adolf Hitler had of the speed with which everything disintegrates in our time and the total reversal of values that the least rectification would signify. Also striking is the very distinct sentiment that he seems to have had that his action represented the last chance of the Aryan race at the same time as the last possibility (at least theoretical) of rectification before the end of this cycle. This sentiment was doubled by the conviction that it was not he himself who was “the last” combatant against the forces of disintegration; not The One who would open the glorious “Age of Gold” of the next cycle. Five years before the seizure of power, the Führer said it in all simplicity to Hans Grimm: “I know that Someone must appear and deal with our situation. I sought this man. I have been unable to find him anywhere, and therefore I stood up, in order to accomplish the preparatory work, only the urgent preparatory work, because I know that I am not The One who must come. And I know also what I lack. But the Other remains absent, and nobody is there, and there is no more time to lose.”¹⁸

There is even place to believe that he had a presentiment—if not knowledge; I will come back to this point—of the inevitability of the disaster and the necessity, for him, to sacrifice himself. But, just as, while being centered on the German people, his vision immensely exceeded Germany, thus his defeat was to be a catastrophe on the planetary scale (which it was, indeed) and his sacrifice was to have an unsuspected significance. He said to Hermann Rauschning: “If we do not manage to win, our fall will bring down half the world, and nobody will be able to rejoice in a victory over Germany”¹⁹; and: “it is destined that I sacrifice myself for the people at the hour of the greatest danger.”²⁰ “He could not, otherwise, achieve his mission,”²¹ notes this author, without apparently realizing the significance of such an assertion.

What then was this “mission,” so pressing despite the fact that The One to whom it was given could, sometimes, envisage its failure in advance? It was the mission of all those beings who were simultaneously human and more-than-human—in India, one calls them “avatars” or “descents” of the divine Spirit into the visible and tangible world—who, age after age, have fought against the current of Time, for the restoration of a material order in the image of the eternal Order: the mission of the God Krishna, of the Prophet Mahomet, and, in Germanic legend, truer than history, of the hero Siegfried, like them at the same time initiate and warrior. Such a mission always implies the destruction of the decadent world, without which the restoration of a society hierarchized according to the eternal values would be unthinkable. It thus implies the recognition of the reign of evil—the “triumph of injustice,”²² i.e., what is contrary with the divine Order, in the very time of the combatant—and the exaltation of combat. No doubt, people who militate by violence against an established order, already bad, in favor of a “new world” even worse from the point of view of natural hierarchies are also malcontents whom armed struggle does not frighten. But, as I tried to show above, it is the nature of their dream, and not the methods employed with a view its realization, that classifies them as exactly opposed to the combatants against time.

There are unconscious, irresponsible combatants—in the direction of temporal evolution as well as against it. There are millions of people “of good will”—liberal, individualistic, pacifist, “friends of Man” of all strands—who, generally from pure ignorance or sluggishness of mind, follow the misleading suggestions of the agents of the dark Forces and contribute, with the most generous intentions in the world, to accelerating the rate of universal degeneration. There are also people perfectly unconscious of the eternal laws of the visible as well as subtle Universe, who militate with enthusiasm for selection by combat, the segregation of the races, and, generally, for an aristocratic conception of the world, by instinct—simply out of horror at the physical and moral ugliness of men and hatred of prejudices and the institutions that encourage their general diffusion. A number of us among them. Nobler than the first, since centered on beauty which, in its essence, merges with Truth, they are, despite everything, also not very responsible, in the strong sense of the word, because they are so attached to the domain of impressions, i.e., the subjective.

But things are different with the leaders, . . . a fortiori with the founders of a new faith.

The true initiator of a subversive movement in the sense of the word that I gave above can be only a man in possession of a certain degree of undeniable knowledge. But he makes use of it in reverse: towards ends contrary to the spirit of true hierarchies; thus contrary to those that should be the goal of the action of a sage. On the other hand, the founder and Leader responsible for a faith “against Time”—as was Adolf Hitler—cannot himself be one of those men I called, in another book,²³ “above Time”: a sage; an initiate in union with the Divine, and simultaneously a warrior—and perhaps also “a politician”—ready to employ, on the level of the contingencies of the visible world, all the means that can be effective, and judging a means only by its effectiveness. He cannot be one man at the same time above Time, regarding his being, and against Time, regarding his action in the world; in other words a warrior (or a politician or one and the other) combatant against the order, institutions, and powers of his time, with no matter what arms, with a view to a “rectification” (at least temporary) of society, inspired by an ideal of the Age of Gold: a will to accord between the “new” order and the eternal Order.

However, I repeat, the texts, the facts, all the history, and all the atmosphere of National Socialism become fully comprehensible only if, once and for all, it is admitted that Adolf Hitler was such a man: the most recent manifestation, among us, from The One-who-returns age after age “for the protection of right, for the destruction of evildoers, for the firm establishment of order according to the nature of the things.”²⁴

* * *

It is certain that the decision of young corporal Hitler of the sixteenth Bavarian infantry regiment “to become a politician”²⁵—a decision taken with the announcement of the capitulation of November 1918, in the tragic circumstances that we all know²⁶—is not enough to explain the extraordinary career of the one who was to become one day the Master of Germany if not of Europe. Moreover, as paradoxical as this may seem, “politics” had never been the main issue for the Führer. He acknowledges, in a conversation of the night of 25-26 January 1942, that he devoted himself to politics “against his taste” and that he saw in it “only a means to an end.²⁷ This “end” is the mission to which I referred above. Adolf Hitler spoke about it in Mein Kampf and many speechs, such as, for example, the one he delivered 12 March 1938 in Linz, and where he said in particular: “If Providence one day called me out of this city to direct the Reich, it is because It had a mission for me, in which I believed, and for which I lived and fought.”

The assurance that he had to act, driven by an impersonal, simultaneously transcendent and immanent Will, of which his individual will was only an expression, was announced by all those who observed him from near or afar. Robert Brasillach mentioned the “divine mission” with which the Führer felt invested. And Hermann Rauschning says that he “is taken for a prophet, whose role exceeds that of a statesman by a hundred cubits.” “No doubt,” he adds, he is not always taken seriously as the herald of a new humanity.”²⁸ Add to that this statement of Adolf Hitler himself, also reported by Rauschning: “He who understands National Socialism as nothing more than a political movement does not know the large part of it. National Socialism is more than a religion; it is the will to create the Superman.”²⁹

Moreover, in spite of his political alliance with the Italy of Mussolini, the Führer perfectly understood the abyss that separated his Weltanschauung,with its biological basis, from Fascism, which remained a stranger to “the stake of the colossal struggle” that he was going to begin, i.e., the meaning of his mission, to him. “It is the National-Socialists, and only us,” he continued, “who have penetrated the secret of the gigantic revolutions that are foretold. And this is why we are the only people, chosen by Providence, to put our mark on the century to come.”³⁰ In fact, few German National Socialists had penetrated this secret. But it was enough that it had been penetrated by him, Adolf Hitler, the Leader and very soul of Germany, to justify the “choice” of the Forces of life, for a people is interdependent with its Leader, at least when he is racially one of its sons. In other words, the priority of Germany was in this occurrence a consequence of the lucidity of its Leader; of the “magic vision”—of the consciousness of a living initiate of the eternal Present—that he alone, of all the politicians and generals of his time, possessed.

It is in this “vision” that one must seek the source of the hostility against the Führer with regard to the modern world—“capitalist” as well as Marxist—and its institutions. It is useless to revisit the case against the superstition of equality, parliamentarism, democracy, etc, which is at bottom none other that the superstition of “man” applied to politics—the case that the founder of the Third Reich made and remade in Mein Kampf as in all his speeches, before the multitudes as before the few. Adolf Hitler also attacks features of our epoch that, if they are not at the root of this superstition—which is infinitely older—nevertheless, cannot help but strengthen its tragic character. He attacks, in particular, the rapid disappearance of the sense of the sacred, the recrudescence of “the technical spirit,” and above all, perhaps, the disordered proliferation of man in inverse proportion to his quality.

While knowing that the Churches were his worst adversaries, and could not be otherwise, because of Christian anthropocentrism, Adolf Hitler took good care not to attack them openly, to say nothing of “persecuting them.” He had been very careful about it, through political skill; also from fear of removing an existing faith from the people before another infiltrated deeply enough into their souls to be able to replace it advantageously.

That did not prevent him from noting that the time of living Christianity was completed; that the Churches no longer represented anything but a “hollow, fragile, and untrue religious apparatus”³¹ that was not even worth the trouble of demolishing from the outside, considering that it is already exhausted on the inside and crumbling all around.

He did not believe in a resurrection of the Christian faith. The faith that in the German lands had never been more than a “veneer,” than a “shell” that had preserved intact beneath it the old piety that it was now a question of reviving and directing. And in the urban masses, he saw “nothing anymore” that revealed an everyday consciousness of the sacred. And he realized that “when everything is dead, one can do nothing to rekindle it.”³² In any case, Christianity was, in his eyes as in ours, nothing but a foreign religion imposed on the Germanic peoples and fundamentally opposed to their genius. Adolf Hitler scorned the responsible men who had been able to be satisfied for so long with puerilities like those the Churches taught the masses. And he was never short of sarcastic remarks such as when, among those with whom he knew he could display perhaps the least popular aspect of his thought, he spoke of Christianity as an “invention of sick brains.”³³

What he reproached about it especially, it seems, is that it alienates its faithful from Nature; that it teaches them contempt of the body and, above all, presents itself to them as the “consoling” religion par excellence: the religion of the afflicted; those who are “worried and burdened”—and do not have the force to carry their burden courageously; those who cannot go on without the idea of a reunion with their loved ones in a naively human Beyond. In it, he detected—like Nietzsche—I don’t know what stench of the miserable and servile common man, and held it to be inferior to even the most primitive mythologies that at least integrate man into the Cosmos; even more inferior than a religion of Nature, ancestors, heroes—and a national State—such as Shintoism, whose origin is lost in the night of prehistory, and that his allies the Japanese had had the intelligence to preserve, by adapting it to modern life.³⁴

 And, by contrast, he readily referred to the beauty of the attitude of its own faithful followers who, free of hope as well as fear, achieved the most dangerous tasks with detachment. “I have,” he said on 13 December 1941, in the presence of Doctor Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Terboven, and others, “six SS divisions made up of men absolutely indifferent regarding religion. That does not prevent them from going to their deaths with a serene soul.”³⁵

Here, “indifference regarding religion” means only “indifference” to Christianity and, perhaps, any exoteric religion; certainly not indifference to the sacred. Quite the contrary! For the Führer reproached Christianity, and undoubtedly any religion or philosophy centered on the “too human,” precisely for the absence in it (as in Christianity) of true piety, which consists in feeling and adoring “God”—the Principle of all being or non-being, the Essence and the the light as well as the Shadow—through the splendor of the visible and tangible world; through the Order and the Rhythm, and the immutable Law that is its expression; the Law that melts the opposites into the same unity, reflection of the unity in oneself. What he reproached was their inability to make the sacred penetrate life, all of life, as as in traditional societies.

And that is exactly what he wanted—and, as I will presently try to show, the SS was to have a great role to play in it—a gradual return of consciousness of the sacred, on various levels, in all strata of the population. Not a more or less artificial resurgence of the worship of Wotan and Thor—the Divine never again appears to the eyes of men in the forms they once forsook—but a return of Germany, and the Germanic world in general, to the Tradition, grasped in a Nordic manner, in the spirit of the old sagas, including those, like the legend of Parsifal, that preserved under Christian trappings the unchanged values of the race; the imprint of eternal values in the collective soul of the race. He wanted to return the German peasant to “the direct and mysterious apprehension of Nature, the instinctive contact, the communion with the Spirit of the Earth”; to scrape off the “Christian veneer” and return to him “the Religion of the race,”³⁶ and, little by little—especially in all the immense new “living space” that he dreamed of conquering in the east—to refashion the mass of his people into a free race of peasant-warriors, as in olden times when the immemorial Odalrecht, the oldest Germanic common law, regulated the relations between men and their chiefs.

It is starting from the countryside where, he knew, behind a vain play of Christian names and gestures, the “pagan beliefs”³⁷ still lived, that he planned day to evangelize the masses of the big cities, the first victims of modern life where, in his own words, “all” was “dead.” (This “all” meant for him “the essential”: the capacity of man, and especially the Aryan of pure blood, to feel at the same time his nothingness as an isolated individual and his immortality as a despositary of the virtues of his race; his conscience of the sacred in daily life.)

He wanted to return this sense of the sacred to every German—to every Aryan—in whom it had grown blurred or lost through generations in contact with the superstitions spread by the Churches and those that a false “science” popularizes more and more today. He knew that it was an arduous and long-term task, from which one could not expect spectacular success, but for which the conservation of pure blood was the indispensable condition of its realization (because beyond a certain, very quickly reached degree of interbreeding, a people is no longer the same people).

* * *

I mentioned above the interest Adolf Hitler showed in modern technologies, especially—and with reason!—those of war. That does not mean that the dangers of the mechanization of life, and especially of specialization to excess, had escaped him. Even in this quite specific domain of strategy, where he, himself a former corporal, moved with a facility that genius itself can scarcely explain, he evinced skepticism with respect to specialists and their inventions and in the last analysis trusted only the supra-rational vision of the true leader—without, of course, rejecting for all that the profirtable application of any invention, insofar as it represented an effective means toward victory. “Which is it,” he said to Rauschning, “the invention that until now could revolutionize the laws of behavior in war in a lasting way? Each invention itself is followed almost immediately by another that neutralizes the effects of the preceding one.” And he concluded that “all this confers only a temporary superiority” and that “the decision in a war always depends on men” rather than material—however important this may be.³⁸

Thus it is not technology in itself that he rejected. A universal genius, he was at ease in this field as in so many others, and he recognized its place in the combat of our time. What irritated him to the point of revulsion were the effects that technical training and the handling of precision machinery as well as statistical data, can have, and almost always do have, on man, even the “gifted” ones, who specialize in them; it is the observation that they kill in them suppleness of spirit, creative imagination, initiative, clarity of vision amidst a labyrinth of unforeseen difficulties; the faculty to grasp, and grasp in time—immediately, if possible—the relationship between a new situation and the effective action that must face up to it; in a word, exact intuition—according to him, the superior form of intelligence. “It is always apart from the milieu of technicians that one encounters creative genius,”³⁹ he said. And he advised his collaborators—and all the more emphatically as they occupied positions of greater responsibility—to make their decisions “by pure intuition”; trusting “their instincts,” never book learning or routine, which in thorny cases generally lags behind the exigencies of action. He advised them “to simplify problems” as he himself simplified them; “to discard all that is complicated and doctrinaire.”⁴⁰ And he repeated that “technicians never have instinct,”⁴¹ entangled as they are in their theories, “like spiders in their webs” and “incompetent to weave anything else.”⁴² And Hermann Rauschning himself, whose ill will towards him is immediately apparent, was forced to agree that “this gift of simplification was the characteristic capacity that ensured the superiority of Adolf Hitler over his entourage.”⁴³

It is sufficient proof to reread, in the book of Leon Degrelle, Hitler for a Thousand Years,⁴⁴ the luminous pages in which he treats the French and the Russian campaigns—in particular the latter, about which many—and not even those who make war their business—reproach Führer so much for being stubborn and listening to the technicians of strategy. The great soldier who was the chief of the “Wallonia” legion of the Waffen SS shows there glaringly that the refusal of Adolf Hitler to let himself be convinced by these famous specialists who, in the winter of 1941-1942, claimed a withdrawl of one hundred or two hundred kilometers, “saved the army,” because “a general retreat through these interminable white and devouring deserts was suicide.”⁴⁵ “Contrary to his Generals, Hitler was right,” he insists—and not only during the seven months of the terrible Russian winter of 1941-1942, but still in January 1943, when he insisted that Paulus, encircled in Stalingrad, try as he might to break out towards the armor of General Hoth, under the command of Marshal von Manstein, who had sent him to the rescue and who was no more than a few kilometers away. According to Degrelle, von Paulus “could have, in forty-eight hours, saved his men,”⁴⁶ but being a “theoretician powerless on the ground,” confused by his meddlesome mania for regroupings based on paper,”⁴⁷ he did not do it, preferring to capitulate when “safety was under his nose, forty-eight kilometers away.”⁴⁸ He did not do it, because in him meticulous study had taken the place of instinct; because he lacked the gift of simplifying problems and going intuitively to the essence. That was undoubtedly due to his nature. But these deficiencies had to have been singularly reinforced due to the fact that “von Paulus had passed almost his whole life among the bureaucracy of the army headquarters,”⁴⁹ before his charts, within the narrow framework of his speciality.

Admittedly, specialists are necessary—in their place. Misfortune requires that, in certain exceptional circumstances, one is sometimes obliged to call upon them apart from the domain of their routine, and to ask them more than they can give. And the more that life, under all its aspects, is mechanized, thanks to the applications of sciences, the more there are, and the more there will be, from the top to the bottom of the social ladder, specialized technicians. And increasingly rare will be those among them who, while having, in their specific capacity, the maximum of knowledge, will be able to master it, by preserving the vision and inspiration, and priceless qualities of character, that constitute the higher man. The Third Reich had such men: “modern” men in what they could do on the material plane (military or civilian); in addition, equal to the greatest figures of the past in what they were: Gudérian, Skorzeny; Hans-Ulrich Rudel; Hanna Reitsch; Doctor Todt; people strong enough to think of and act for the great whole while making use of the machines of our time and demanding the precise handling they require; Western counterparts of those Japanese warriors of the same Second World War who united the intelligent handling of the most modern weapons with fidelity to the code of bushido and, more often than one might think, the practice of some immemorial spiritual discipline.

The Führer would have preferred that the best of his Germans become, more or less, these new “Masters of fire,” able to dominate the end of our cycle where technology is, with all its disadvantages, essential to those who wish to survive in an over-populated world. He knew indeed that this role could not and could never be played except by a minority. And it is precisely this minority, tested in combat, that would have to constitute the warlike aristocracy of the new world; the world of the counter-current of universal decadence that he dreamed of building, and in which, moreover, “after the victory”—once the urgency of total war disappeared—the mechanization of life would gradually cease, and where the traditional spirit, in the esoteric sense of the word, would be established more and more.

⁸ E. Kirkdorf, Fritz Thyssen, Voegler, Otto-Wolf von Schröder, then Krupp.

⁹ This is probably a misprint, perhaps for 1960, since Günther died in 1968.—Ed.

¹⁰ “. . . unsere neue Auffassung, die ganz dem Ursinn der Dinge entspricht . . .” (Mein Kampf, 440.)