The Occult Origins of Nazi Ideology: the Superstition Behind White Supremacism.

the history of world war ii is one of
those peculiar topics where the teacher or professor never needs to pause to explain to the class why does this matter students never raise their hands and demand to know why do we need to study this at all if any of you in the audience know what it's like to teach math if you know what it's like to teach french grammar you know what it's like to have students put up their hands and demand to know why are you teaching this to me anyway why does this matter somehow it's very clear to everyone that our understanding our narrative that we've construed in a certain world about what happened in world war ii and why it matters and what it means to us today this is something quite integral to each of us individually in how we fashion our own political identity in the 21st century and for many countries around the world their sense of identity and purpose is still to this day formed by world war ii oh you you think i'm just talking about the united states you think i'm just talking about australia and canada or or germany or france have you heard of india have you ever thought about the way world war ii is linked to the decline and fall of the british empire and how those countries achieved independence have you thought for a minute about what world war ii means to them it's a big deal it's it's been a big deal for a while and it's going to continue to be a big deal and of course what you mostly see on the internet is right-wing demagogues who are challenging the official narrative about what happened in world war ii uh for completely insincere and frankly evil reasons and most of us who are maybe moderates pragmatists in the center or left of center most of us don't ever stop to think maybe there's really some benefit for us also in going back and re-examining the roots of fascism the origins of nazi ideology in europe and in evaluating the extent to which we ourselves maybe were raised with propaganda even if that propaganda were constructed and construed and taught to us with no bad intentions whatsoever give you an example my father had this aesthetic sense that to refer to adolf hitler as a madman to refer to fascism or nazism as insanity uh was childish that that was a sort of unsophisticated redneck view of history whereas he felt and he conditioned me to think also uh it was erudite and sophisticated to evaluate what adolf hitler did as if it were a rational response to economic conditions after world war one this may sound familiar to a lot of you in rationalizing that chapter of history you are ipso facto necessarily sweeping under the rug occult elements esoteric elements spirituality and remarkably in the year 2020 it's very clear to say those spiritual esoteric occult elements are the elements now being revived that are popular once again in the form preserved in the writings of julius [Music] evila [Music] i prefer to pronounce his name evola so that it rhymes with ebola but sadly the name is pronounced julius evola here's a google engram chart showing you the resurgence in popularity since the year 2000 and and keep in mind google engram is only showing you how many times this name appeared in print in books this is not capturing how many times this guy is being discussed on podcasts on youtube on websites like the original alt-right.com the new age person never wants to go deep beyond the surface level feel-good aspects of their philosophies which makes it the perfect religion for the new world order because it allows its followers to be internally detached it gives them a way to spiritually amuse themselves but nothing more now the difference with uh tradition is that there are several schools of fully developed thought where the path requires a real effort and will challenge the person to grow and develop with any traditional path you have to put in actual work and there's no easy victories no fluffy feel-good answers so some aspects of tradition might be very appealing to new agers like the ones who quote the buddha and put statues of him in their gardens but it's ultimately just a fashion statement for them to them the buddha was just this witty guy who makes them feel good but as soon as buddhism starts demanding genuine effort from them they move on to the next feel-good thing one of the reasons why his name is bandy devotes so much on social media is that he's one of the few remaining philosophers of nazism whose name will not result in you immediately getting banned from these same social media websites and and why is that it's because julius evela unlike unlike a guy like rosenberg right rosenberg was more influential when they were both alive he was more of an official spokesperson for and mouthpiece for the nazi party and he also wrote about so-called spiritual racism very closely comparable uh uh this guy evola he kind of has a peg that he can hang his hat on as a buddhist scholar as a white guy who got inspired by buddhism and converted to buddhism as a guy who was on some kind of spiritual journey of self-discovery i don't sympathize i really don't but this has been crucial to the enduring respectability of his works and yeah i've got to put asterisk next to respectability but he's certainly regarded as much more respectable today than any other face or name we're going to talk about in this video why bother with evela given that he's a scary looking nazi collaborator that most people have never heard of well two reasons the first is that evola is more important than you might think many of the prominent figures of the alt-right including steve bannon richard spencer and some more obscure guys on youtube and elsewhere cite evola as a major influence the second reason to bother with evola is that even people who oppose his politics nonetheless recognize his work for its erudition and influence people like herman hess umberto echo and carl jung so with the contemporary salience of evolism having been noted for the record when are these issues going to come up in conversation let's just pretend the class is demanding no why does this matter number one linguistics number two politics number three religion namely buddhism hinduism and new religious movements which is the polite academic term for cults i would say that the majority of people who talk about the origins of aryan race theory are dealing with linguistics and if you look this up on youtube you're going to see a lot of really mealy-mouthed evasive uncomfortable discourse about this issue and i think in the next 10 20 years you're gonna see a similar sort of cowardice creep into a lot of european discussions of what happened in world war ii because there's a very loud and angry voice of dissent on this issue coming from modern india because uh i'll say it's only in passing but it should be realized that there has never been a more politically relevant theory of of history and of linguistics than the aryan invasion theory in the 19th century it was already used by the british to justify their colonialism in the 20th century it became the main paradigm for the nazi worldview and then in india it has been used by a number of political movements the ambedkar rights the dravidianists and also by the christian missionaries in order to divide and belittle in the society so against that hindu nationalists have tried to support the refutation of an aryan invasion and therefore the support of the indian indian homeland theory there are more than a billion people in india who demand to be heard they're certainly being heard here on the internet and increasingly they're going to be heard in classrooms and western universities and high schools there are people in india who say hey hey hey you're telling this history about the aryan race theory whether that's in linguistics or pertaining to nazism in specific hey that's our history how dare you you know and the indians will very specifically say that they're sick and tired of so-called white european experts weighing in on this and they have their own story to tell so again the history of world war ii is now going to be rewritten re-examined reconsidered partly just in light of the increasing multiculturalism of the context in which it is being taught in traditional symbolism the supernatural principle was conceived as masculine and the principle of nature and of becoming as feminine in hellenic terms the one which is in itself complete and self-sufficient is regarded as masculine conversely the dyad the principle of differentiation and of the other then self and thus the principle of desire and movement is regarded as feminine in hindu terms the impassable spirit purusha is masculine while prokhti the active matrix of every conditioned form is feminine the far eastern tradition has expressed equivalent concepts through the cosmic duality of yin yang the self-evidently shocking history of aryan race discourse is whitewashed by linguists for the purpose of just getting on with teaching linguistics honestly i don't sympathize but if you put yourself in the mindset of someone who has a phd in linguistics and they want to talk about vowel changes and how you historically analyze different types of consonant sounds they don't want to get into a political discussion of the significance of aryan race theory and the connection between linguistics and frankly nazism so yes there is a great deal of whitewashing going on this story begins with a guy named marcus van boxhorn and really note the date of his death there 1650 so he dies about 200 years before this issue really kind of explodes in the newspapers of europe and it's worth noting that at that early stage this was a pretty innocuous and harmless theory developed in response to some astonishing discoveries the writing of the most ancient sacred texts of hinduism and buddhism in the sanskrit language and the pali language respectively is unbelievably remote from western europe both geographically and chronologically what a shocking discovery to find that these are written in a language that's really very closely related to latin what boxhorn did was take this startling revelation and simply attribute the common origin of these languages to some ancient ancestors a set of ancestors he supposed might be the scythians or someone similar to the scythians if you've never heard of the scythians they have left us a legacy of really beautiful little metal statues little urns and vases that you can see in museums around europe and frankly around the world all my life i've seen little reminders of ancient scythian culture nothing particularly nothing particularly special about them and really it would be pretty harmless if people in france and people in russia felt that they had some common ancestry in this ancient people called the scythians it's not true they're not you know the genesis of the aryan language family or the so-called aryan race or anything else but really step one of this hypothesis is so innocuous it's hard to imagine how this leads more than 200 years later to genocide the next name on this slide william jones is the one hated with the most intensity and the most passion in india does he really deserve all this hate doesn't matter he is the man in the newspapers of india still today in the 21st century most commonly blamed for developing or propounding or popularizing aryan race theory the aryan migration hypothesis etc etc all the evils of british colonialism are attributed to william jones and everything wrong with india today was invented by william jones again dead in 1794 still still quite remote from the events of world war ii then the third name coming in a bit closer here is franz bopp anyone teaching a linguistics course would want to run through this box horn jones bop just deal with the dry phonological facts just deal with the history of the etymological discoveries and they don't want to talk about nazis they especially don't want to talk about the occult esoteric and spiritual aspects of nazism and how these are bundled up with and originate from this crazy linguistic theory the rise of german nationalism and ultimately of nazi imperialism coincides with co-ops and takes advantage of the decline of the austro-hungarian empire in the austro-hungarian empire one of the most important forms of racism was racism against slavic people specifically the hatred of slavic people by german people german people who wanted to imagine themselves being superior to the slavs take a look at this map green yellow red blue see how it's color coded which one of those colors on the map do you think indicates the aryan race discovered by this linguistic hypothesis the answer is all of them one of many things that fundamentally doesn't make sense about aryan race theory whether you think of it linguistically or biologically was that it didn't work for the germans it didn't actually proclaim them or establish them as superior to the people they most hated the people they were both planning to be at war with and actually were at war you know from hitler's minecon forward the big plan was for germany to have an empire achieved by conquering what was then russia the ukraine etc eastern europe so if that's the game plan why don't you invent some kind of quote unquote scientific theory of racism that actually makes sense for your political objectives this never did if anything the aryan race hypothesis would lead to russians and germans embracing one another as brothers but of course yeah it just doesn't make sense looking further afield on this map of course uh includes places like france i mean wouldn't the germans prefer to have a racial theory that makes them superior to the french don't think about it too much uh the italians and oh yes yes y'all northern india and iran so this is a theory that if taken seriously would declare the brotherhood of the people of northern europe with northern india and iran and at the same time the germans are trying to make a big deal out of having blonde hair and blue eyes but the people of greece and italy and iran and india they're not they're not real you see there are a whole lot of things here that right off the bat just don't make sense i suppose you could say my major thesis here is that we shouldn't be surprised at just how spiritual just how superstitious the neo-nazism of our own times is given that nazism proper originated in this way from a spiritualist and not scientific movement at the beginning of the video i complained that my own father and my schoolteachers tended to emphasize a kind of economic rationalism that somehow the economic conditions following after world war one produced the nazi movement fascism in germany but much more broadly and much more deeply it's profoundly important to appreciate that darwinism and scientific racism were utterly irrelevant to people like joseph arthur de gabino in the 21st century school teachers scientists politicians and quite possibly our own parents want to caution us against scientific racism they want to caution us against the tendency towards social darwinism but that tends to profoundly misrepresent this history [Music] [Applause] uh uh welcome to the show um i i want to confess that i did not know your name on monday in our times nothing could be more common than to observe a political leader rise to fame on the basis of their appearance their charm or maybe even the quality of their voice when they're giving lectures i think there's no doubt that the sex appeal of alexandria ocasio-cortez has been a crucial part of her meteoric rise to fame as a major political leader in the united states of america bernie sanders did not have this advantage in the same way in the 19th century there is this strange difficult to pin down quality of charisma that exists in the written word there is nothing scientific about his writing his claims about the history of chinese civilization or the history of athens in rome would have been laughed out of university lecture halls even in his own time however still to this day he is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in the history of france whatever quality it is that makes someone's writing appealing he had it he had so much of this peculiar difficult to define charisma that he would shape the future of the next hundred years and literally guide millions of people to their deaths gabino was a man who lived out of step with his times indeed he even was a little bit too much of a living anachronism to be compatible with the fully developed nats ideology that would ensue after him under his tutelage we might say he went to persia and he saw persia as a fallen civilization why was it fallen because he imagined simply in the same way that he imagined that china was founded by aryan people that there had been this other race of people who were pure-blooded and brilliant and good and virtuous who had created a wonderful civilization there but now here he was in the ruins of what remained of persian civilization after that founding race had been lost basically through intermarriage there can be no doubt that part of gabino's popular appeal part of the reason why he sold so many copies of this book and influenced so many people for the next hundred years was that he had visited these places himself and spoke about them both with a certain kind of um poetic license and also with the self-confidence as someone who had seen these wonders of the world face to face obviously in the 1850s very few people had traveled to greece very few people had traveled to persia very few people had traveled to brazil and very very very few people had traveled to all of these places and could make comparative statements about them however there were innumerable publications by travelers and explorers competing on that same bookshelf it's important to keep in mind to hold the audience here there was nothing convincing about gabino's work people chose to believe it people were eager to accept this mythology that was as i think you can see from the screenshots just self-evidently made up off the top of this guy's head wikipedia provides a remarkably well researched overview of the life and times of joseph arthur de gabano however when it comes to history you always have to look at primary sources there's nothing quite like the real thing if you do look at gobindo's own writing you'll find there are many distinctive aspects of nancy doctrine that are absent from his work and these would be supplied by the author houston stewart chamberlain very soon thereafter following in governor's footsteps for one thing there's absolutely no optimism about the future in governor's work there is no possibility whatsoever of racial regeneration national upliftment of something better or something positive coming for the german people for the french people for anyone really he doesn't see anything positive in european imperialism expanding and conquering africa and india he only sees everything getting worse and worse he sees all of civilization as declining after it hit an early pinnacle in you know a few select places like ancient athens ancient rome um he's a big fan of persia if you hadn't guessed so on and so forth this is a view of the world in perpetual decline throughout all of his works there is very little emphasis on anti-semitism i can't claim that there is zero anti-semitism in his works he says some remarkably positive things about jews here and there though and his books are certainly lacking the conspiratorial view that everything wrong with western civilization is due to jewish influence that would come soon enough from houston stuart chamberlain finally his lifelong obsession was with his own status as an aristocrat and his vision of the world where everyone is getting stupider and stupider due to racial miscegenation but here and there there are isolated extraordinary individuals who through the institution of aristocracy have maintained the purity of their blood and are therefore superior to everyone else just as he felt he was superior to everyone else himself this profoundly aristocratic view of the world is actually incompatible with nazism which is fundamentally a pro-poor folk-ish movement it's about the people the masses as a whole and obviously mobilizing and trying to get you know political support from exactly the kind of people that gabineau utterly despises you really need to assess this phenomenon in spiritual terms in occult terms because the way that the first wave of smash hit philosophers thought about this was much more spiritual than it was biological if you were to ask the question why did anyone take this seriously probably the answer just is that it was flattering to the germans they probably just liked the idea that there was this erudite philological expert telling them that they were the master race at a time when the germans weren't really the masters of much of anything the only way to make sense out of this is to look at it spiritually is to analyze it as an esoteric cult phenomenon because from day one that's what it was guys like gabano didn't just regard ancient iran as remote geographically they didn't just think about ancient greece and ancient rome as remote geographically also they also thought of it chronologically their idea of the aryan race was that the great founders of these civilizations had been members of these races but the current inhabitants of italy the current inhabitants of greece the current inhabitants of iran they didn't represent that race at all oh no it was only the mystical ancient founders who have been part of it and for absolutely no reason um those same ancient mystical founders they're alive and well in germany today makes absolutely no sense it's just mythology there's no but governor actually went to all these places he wrote a series of hit books he's the first smash hit author writing this insane aryan race theory stuff he actually went to and lived in iran he learned to speak the language to some extent he lived in greece for several years he disapproved of and condemned everything about the greeks he said they'd completely lost their ancient glory and he attributed this to their degeneration from their formal racial status he traveled around the world as nutcase eccentric everywhere projecting onto the world around him these theories he made up in his own head almost any political program can be summarized in terms of a simple statement of what do you want to accomplish and what are you willing to do to get there you can summarize what bernie sanders is all about by saying hey the followers of bernie sanders want free health care what are they willing to do to get it raise taxes the followers of bernie sanders want the united states of america to have a european style university system with very cheap or free tuition what are they willing to do to get it they're willing to reduce military spending by 90 percent very simple way to approach politics what is the objective what are you willing to do to get there for quite a long time before the rise of adolf hitler the people of germany were influenced by great world empires like that of england france spain and to some extent even russia they looked at the map of the world they saw that the united kingdom the british empire had a massive overtly genocidal empire in australia in canada to some extent in india and they said me too they saw all the evils and horrors of the british empire and they felt jealous they wanted to have that for themselves as you know hitler's proposal specifically was to conquer eastern europe so eastern europe would become for germany what the united states was for england that was the plan there were other proposals what the italian fascists were trying to do was to build a new empire by conquering little bits and pieces of north africa and what we now call the middle east or the levant same kind of thing it was imperialist envy they looked at a map they saw the grandeur of these huge colored in areas constituting the british empire the french empire etc and they felt left out and they were willing to make up or believe almost any lie in order to get there so you have a complete nut case like gabino who by the way if you couldn't guess from the name wasn't even german you have a complete not case like gabano telling you that the germans are the greatest people in the world and they should go forth and conquer the rest of the world and create this empire there were a whole lot of germans who were eager to hear it and were eager to believe the most crazy nonsense imaginable whether it be pro-christian or anti-christian pro-pagan or trying to return to the you know virtues of ancient rome a million different flavors of this came out after gabano the other name you see on this slide houston stuart chamberlain is a great example of someone who worked with richard wagner in making this theory massively popular in germany while again remarkably he was not german with both goberno and chamberlain i have to emphasize just how many books they sold just what a huge audience they managed to reach and influence people who want to tell this story in terms of intellectual responses to charles darwin i think there's an onus on them to prove just just how many people do you think read scientific inquiries that were disputing charles darwin's book on the descent of man whether you attribute this to charisma on the part of the particular authors or muir happenstance the fact is that chamberlain's work was so popular it was even being used as a textbook in high schools i think that many of us are reluctant to face up to the fact that a creative artist like richard wagner could be really more influential and more historically and more politically important than all of those scientific theorists working on evolution put together the reality is richard wagner in his own time was more famous and more influential than michael jackson and he was more respected more widely esteemed as a genius than albert einstein and what did he do with his wealth and fame and power and influence he made joseph degabano and houston stewart chamberlain into two of the most influential authors of their century in the writing of houston stewart chamberlain as promoted by wagner i feel we're no longer talking about an antecedent to the philosophy of adolf hitler we're really looking at the philosophy of adolf hitler itself a large part of this book is a jewish conspiracy theory everything bad and wrong in the world and the distinctive trait of the 19th century foretelling the wars to come in the 20th century everything everything is blamed on the jews the notion of who and what the jews are and what the conflict is between the aryan race and the jews remains spiritual not scientific it's not the case that the neo-nazi ideology digressed from a scientific worldview into a more spiritual worldview on the contrary this was an occult movement from first to last that relatively late in its development started to embellish its arguments with the cynical and not at all convincing use of scientific factoids that's why i think it's so important that we emphasize that the most popular and most influential authors in this earlier phase were these spiritual superstitious new age ones however you want to put it we have to look at later authors like helena blavatsky guido list and rudolph steiner as being consistent with that spiritualistic direction it's not the case that the spiritual direction was a digression from some kind of pre-established powerful social darwinist tradition that was dominating the political landscape in germany at that time on the contrary what year did charles darwin actually publish on the origin of species right right right 1859 and even then that was for a pretty small audience of scientifically inclined specialists his influence and importance of course grew through the 1860s and then you have on the descent of man 1871 but it's just not reasonable to represent the occult element as if it is a footnote in the history of a scientific debate about evolution on the contrary when charles darwin was for the first time struggling to publish and becoming a public figure of some importance there already was this well-established powerful influential and totally insane spiritual discourse that had become tremendously politically powerful in germany in large part through the agency of richard wagner let's compare this briefly to the so-called respectable scholars who played some kind of role in this same story these are the guys who get most of the criticism and they get most of the blame you know why because if you criticize max mueller if you criticize george sorrell if you criticize rhys davids you sound respectable yourself you can turn in a term paper in university and get an a plus this is kind of where the uh socially acceptable discourse about the antecedents the nazi movement proto-nazi philosophy that that's where it lies the problem is of course none of these people really influenced a mass audience in the same way that richard wagner did in the same way that the various authors who were gathered into his circle did it may seem hard to believe now because these names have been long since forgotten but people like gavino people like chamberlain they reached a mass audience likewise nobody today even wants to write a term paper criticizing helena blavatsky nobody wants to write a term paper criticizing liszt nobody wants to write a term paper criticizing rudolf steiner it wouldn't be respectable even to engage in the critique of these figures because they are regarded as such crackpots and yet he is precisely these crackpot figures who were most influential in establishing this bizarre spiritual approach to racism the occult elements of the origin of nazi ideology my sling is editorial explicit material briefcase show 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