Savitri Devi transformed Nazism into a religion after traveling to Germany in October 1945 to lead resistance, distributing propaganda claiming Hitler's survival while whitewashing Allied bombings and atrocities. She later wrote "Gold in the Furnace" during imprisonment, theorizing Hitler as Vishnu's reincarnation within a trinity including Akhenaten and Genghis Khan. This syncretism bridged environmentalism and neo-Nazism, connecting groups like the British National Party and inspiring modern accelerationist factions such as the Base and Fwewkrieg Division. By merging Hindu mythology, Norse paganism, and internet subcultures like Kekism, her legacy facilitates extremist recruitment, influencing figures from Anders Breivik to Brenton Tarrant, ultimately evolving Nazism from a dead political system into a living, dangerous faith. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:05
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespiece and Michael Manchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where every week we read about a terrible person.
Meeting Old Nazis00:15:59
And this one is part two of the story of Savitri Debbie.
And most importantly, today is the episode recorded on the tail end of my recorder's battery.
So we are fucking daredevils right now.
Wow.
Okay.
I like, Robert, you're edging.
Yeah, this is the podcast equivalent of edging.
Yes.
This is edging.
This is what it means.
I've never been totally clear on what edging is, but I think that this is.
I am the first person to edge more than 100,000 people at the same time.
Wow.
Okay, that was a flex on many levels, and I'm just going to plow through it.
Okay, so that's what edging's all about.
Edging is just plowing through it.
Wow.
Wait, edging is when you're like, I'm not going to.
When you bring someone to like, yeah, you go to like the edge of orgasm, but you keep stopping.
And then you're like, that's the joke.
No.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, I brought up the joke originally, and now I'm explaining why I was correct to do so, which is what all great comedians do.
So in October of 1945, Hitler's death still fresh on her mind, Savitri Devi took part in the festival of Kali at the Kalagat Temple in Calcutta.
Now, Kali is the Hindu deity of destruction, a blue-skinned goddess, and in traditional depictions, she wears a necklace of severed heads, a skirt made from severed arms, and wields just about every conceivable manner of ancient weapon in her mini arms.
Metal.
You see a lot of ties.
Yeah, it's really cool.
Like some of the statues of her are like fucking 20 feet tall.
It's metal as hell.
Yeah.
So as the goddess of destruction, Kali tends to inspire some pretty powerful feelings.
As Savitri stared up at the image of her goddess, covered in gore and armed with massive swords the size of small cars, she begged Khali for her blessing, a blessing of violence and destruction against the Allied powers who had destroyed her beloved Nazi Germany.
She left the ceremony convinced that it was now her duty to do what she'd failed to do back in 1939.
She had to finally travel to Germany and take part in the resistance to the Allies by any means necessary.
She left her 20 cats in the care of a friend and left her that's so mean to that friend.
Oh my god.
And the cats.
Yeah, it's pretty wild.
Imagine being 20 cats behind.
This is a person who leaves her 20 cats behind and the care of a friend to go be a Nazi like a month or two after Hitler died.
Like months after Hitler died.
You get that text.
You're just like, hey, so like, I have to go do a thing.
Could you look after my cats indefinitely, right?
No, no.
Could you look after my cats indefinitely while I go to try to resurrect Nazism in 1940s Germany?
Parentheses, there's 20 of the cats, by the way.
They're here just like it gets worse and worse.
Oh my God.
Wow.
I think that's all good stuff.
Of all the cruel and horrible things that this woman has done, and I don't even know all of them yet.
This has to rank like top 10.
This is bad.
It's pretty bad.
She's a bad person.
Yeah, she's not a great friend or person.
No.
But she does finally reach the birthplace of Hitlerism, the center of the ideology she'd adopted for herself in 1948.
She later wrote in her book, Golden the Furnace, that the gods had ordained that I should have a glimpse of ruins.
Bitter irony of fate.
Germany at that point was still largely destroyed and chopped up into four pieces by its victorious enemies.
So she's so horrified at how bad things are in Germany.
She writes, quote, One remembers, I say, that episode of the Second War as one beholds the ruins of all the German cities, the plight of men and women in the overcrowded areas still fit to live in, and all the misery, all the bitterness consequent of that devilish bombing.
Streams of fire, tons of phosphorus relentlessly poured over his people for five years.
These were England's thanks to Adolf Hitler for having shown mercy to her soldiers in his hour of victory.
These were the thanks of the United States of America for his orders not to shoot the parachutists captured on German soil.
Which is like, so she's framing the British evacuations from the coast of France as like German mercy rather than incompetence on Hitler's behalf, which they actually were just rank incompetence on Hitler's behalf.
No care.
She's also talking about the mercy of Germany and not killing captured Allied paratroopers, which was illegal.
And in doing this, she's ignoring, for one example, the Malmedy massacre, in which a Waffen-SS troop massacred 84 American POWs with machine guns.
She's also ignoring the estimated 3.3 million Russian POWs who died in German custody.
But if I wind up arguing actual history with a dead Nazi, we'll be here all day.
So we're just going to move forward from that.
Fair, fair, fair.
She whitewashes things a bit, is the point.
Just a bit.
A bit.
Just a bit.
A scoosh.
Just a scoop.
I mean, obviously, it's going to be horrible seeing Germany after World War II because the bombing campaign over Germany was one of the greatest crimes in history.
That said, they kind of had it coming.
They're like.
Ooh, the takes are coming in hot tonight.
I mean, fuck man.
If anyone has ever deserved that, it's fucking Nazi Germany.
Yeah, no, I mean, they are.
They do present themselves as a pretty clear target.
Good lord.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can say the Allies maybe the Allies went overboard in some areas while also being like, but what were they supposed to do?
I think a bit of an overreaction may have been like, it's historically you're like, okay, okay.
Yeah.
You got to do something about it.
You know, it's something to not be happy about, but of the list of historical crimes I'm going to be outraged at, it's lower than, for example, the ones committed by Nazi Germany.
Yeah, sure.
Sure.
Yeah.
Now, before visiting Germany, Savitri had hung out in Sweden, where a number of Nazis had fled after the war.
There she met Sven Heden, a Nazi supporting explorer and author, and a number of former members of the Nazi Party who were hiding out there because, you know, it was a crime to be a Nazi now.
She told them her mission was to deliver a message of hope to the German people.
Now, since Nazism was a bit unpopular after the Second World War, she was unable to find any printers in Sweden to actually print out this message of hope.
So instead, Savitri Devi had to write out 500 leaflets by hand.
Each featured a swastika in these words.
Quote, Men and women of Germany, in the midst of unspeakable rigors and suffering, hold fast to our glorious national socialist faith and resist.
Defy the people, defy the powers which work to denazify the German nation and the whole world.
Nothing can destroy what is built on truth.
We are pure gold which can be tested in the furnace.
The furnace may glow and crackle.
Nothing can destroy us.
One day we will rebel and triumph again.
Hope and wait.
Heil Hitler.
So she writes 500 of these by hand.
And wearing a sari and swastika earrings, Savitri Devi takes a train across Germany and tosses out hundreds of leaflets over the course of about 15 hours.
Attached to each was a gift, a small amount of coffee, sugar, butter, sardines, or cigarettes.
She considered this journey to be an act of religious devotion, describing the leaflets as written and thrown by the gods through me.
As her train crossed from Germany into Belgium, she sang a Hindu hymn to Shiva.
So, a lot of commitment, a lot of commitment is going into this.
Yes, yes.
And that is all you can say.
Yeah, that is, yeah.
Now, so she gets inspired by the success of her first visit, and she plans two more trips through Germany.
She spent a little bit of time resting in London and meeting up with fascists in London.
And because of all the fascists that are in London, she's able to actually find a printer to print up 6,000 additional leaflets to take to Germany.
Using a connection to an old friend in France, she secured a military permit to visit Germany for a longer period of time, claiming, not falsely, that she intended to write a book about the nation's post-war trials.
Her second trip into Germany lasted three months, and she successfully handed out all 6,000 leaflets.
She also met with a number of old Nazis.
None of them were very high-ranking.
These were like third-rate Nazis.
Some of them were battling former POWs.
And some of these POWs did have legitimate stories of Allied brutality that they'd faced in captivity.
Because like, you know, it was a war.
She interviewed numerous German citizens, introducing herself at the start as a committed Nazi to gain their trust.
Savitri would then talk about her belief that Adolf Hitler was still alive somewhere in the world and assure these defeated Nazis that surely they were only two or three years away from a revival of Nazism in Germany.
Imagine Hitler was your Tupac.
Like that is such a wild Hitler literally her Tupac.
She's like, no, he's on an island somewhere.
You don't understand.
This is all amazing album.
Yeah.
He's got an album.
You've really, yeah.
You've got to be fooled by the rest of this.
The hologram's a decoy.
Oh, that's sleek.
I mean, I think we can, I mean, that said, we both agree that the hologram is a decoy.
Oh, no, the hologram is absolutely a decoy.
Yeah, it's a decoy.
Now, one of these conversations that Savitri had with a former Wehrmacht soldier is worth me reading out here.
And I'm going to quote again from the book Hitler's Priestess.
Quote: Continuing his narrative to post-war conditions in occupied Germany, the old fighter's face darkened.
Nice people to talk about freedom and justice, these damned Democrats.
They have tied us hand in foot so we cannot move.
They have muzzled us so we can offer no resistance while they plunder our country left and right, dismantle and carry off our factories piece by piece, cut down our forests, take our oil, our iron, our steel, all that we have, and into the bargain make people believe that we were to blame for the war.
These confounded liars.
He lusted for revenge.
He longed for the day when the last Allies ran for their lives to escape Germany, when Paris would lay in ruins at its next German occupation.
Next time he would show neither mercy nor good humor.
Savitri Devi felt a sense of mounting excitement as his mood became ever uglier, and he began to describe in a raised voice how he would kill his enemies.
This was the spirit she sought.
The rolling eyes of a wounded animal, a war god of the Stone Age, thirsting for blood, barbaric magnificence.
It was a perfect meeting of minds.
The violent, resentful German and the Aryan prophetess of revenge.
The day of reckoning seemed already nearer.
Okay.
She has a fun trip to Germany.
I mean, you know, she had me at the beginning with the, you know, feeling plundered and betrayed by the Democratic Party.
Sure.
Yes.
That's a strong.
She was not talking about the Democratic Party, though.
I know.
I know.
I just.
Robert.
I was away from the mic at that point.
What else can I do?
I can confirm you were not away from the mic, as I think everyone.
I agree you were right up on.
This is revisionist.
This is absurd.
This is Savitri Devi levels of revisionism.
You.
You are the Savitri Devi of this podcast.
That's so mean.
At least make me the Elizabeth Holmes of this podcast.
Jeez.
You have not earned that yet, Jamie.
Make me a fun one.
Make me a fun.
Make me a fun bastard.
Come on.
Make me a fun, tragic one with a ponytail, at least.
Yeah, there's nothing tragic about Savitri.
No.
So she returned to France in December of 1948 and immediately began to write a book, Gold in the Furnace, about her experiences and her growing conception of Hitlerism as something beyond what the old National Socialists had really believed.
In February of 1949, three chapters into her book, Savitri Devi was arrested by French authorities.
She spent a total of six months.
Yeah, because, you know, it's illegal to be a Nazi for good reason.
I'm like, wait, hold on, unpack that.
Yes, I understand.
Yeah.
She spent a total of six months in pretrial detention and then prison after her conviction for spreading Nazi propaganda.
The time behind bars was good for Savitri, as it historically often is for Nazis who fancy themselves writers.
Like her idol Adolf Hitler, she used her prison time as an excuse to finish her first book.
She just uses it as like a sabbatical, as one would a sabbatical.
Yeah.
It's an old Nazi story.
She also took the opportunity to meet even more old Nazis.
A lot of National Socialists were still imprisoned by the British occupation forces, and these old fighters were all too happy to talk with Savitri Devi.
Her dearest friend in the prison was a former wardress from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a quote, beautiful-looking woman, a blonde of about my age, in Devi's words.
She claimed that this war criminal had the classical beauty of a chieftain's wife in ancient Germany.
And again, this was a woman who worked at a concentration camp voluntarily.
Yeah, the language is so, yeah.
Yeah.
And Savitri writes about like how cruel this woman's imprisonment was and how nice the concentration camps was.
Like, she's trash.
She's trash.
Oh, she's absolute trash.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time debunking her shit.
She's garbage.
Yeah.
And it's crazy.
I mean, it's like she is the one that is providing all of this information, too.
She is the source.
Yeah, she is the source.
And again, I can't say it enough.
She never had the chutzpah to actually go to Nazi Germany while it existed.
I think because, number one, she would have been disappointed because none of this weird religious shit she attached to it was an actual part of Nazism in Nazi Germany.
Like, she would have like, she would have been like a just like she might have gotten knocked up by some Nazi, like at the orders of Heinrich Himmler, but she wouldn't have, she wouldn't have been anything special in Nazi Germany.
The odds are good.
Like, maybe they would have tried to use her to like propagandize because she knew a bunch of languages.
I don't know.
They might have had her try to reach out to India, but probably she would have just been another person.
I don't know.
I think that's an interesting aspect of it that isn't emphasized enough.
She just wasn't willing to actually go to Nazi Germany.
This place she claimed ruled.
Yeah.
Ugh.
Cool.
Cool.
So, well.
In late 1949, Savitri Devi was again a free woman, and she published her first book to widespread acclaim from the international Nazi community.
From this point on, Devi became a prolific author, writing up every significant event in her life through a mixture of supposedly non-fiction works as well as fanciful tales.
For example, she retold the story of her first trip back to Europe in the children's fable Long Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess, whose heroine is a cat-loving Nazi named Heliodora.
No, that can't be real.
Yeah, it's a real brain.
That sounds like random words selected from a oh.
Well, it all makes sense.
Like, Heliodora is really a self-insert character.
Well, based on everything we know about cats, Helio, Savitri Devi's obsessed with sun gods and goddesses.
Like, it's all God.
How embarrassing for her.
What's embarrassing is that Savitri writes that her self-insert fantasy character has, quote, no human feelings in the ordinary sense of the word.
She had been, from her very childhood, much too profoundly shocked at the behavior of man towards animals to have any sympathy for people suffering on account of their being Jews.
Obsession With Sun Gods00:04:14
Okay.
The Holocaust isn't bad.
Have you seen what happened to cats when I was a kid?
But here's the thing.
Quite a take.
The cat.
Quite a take.
That is a wild take to be like, you know how we resolve violence towards cats, also cause violence towards people.
Yeah.
Surely it'll.
The Holocaust is cool because cats have been mistreated.
Is Savitri Devi's watching?
She just goes to a whole other place.
She's like, did you know, like, when you're having, like, when you're having an argument with someone who doesn't want to have a good faith argument with you?
Yeah.
And you're just like, well, what about this?
And they're like, well, what about cats in France?
What about that?
Huh?
And you're like, I don't.
I've been stunned like a Pokemon.
Yeah, that's amazing.
I don't know.
Over the next few years, Savitri wrote and conversed with increasingly aged Nazis and gradually refined her theories about the world until in 1958 she published what would prove to be her magnum opus, The Lightning in the Sun.
In this work, the ideas Savitri had been rattling around in her head all finally came together.
Hitler, she concluded, was a man against time, fighting to uphold Aryan virtues and blood against the corruption of modernity.
She placed him at the center of her own trinity, one that replaced the decadent Christian one she'd grown up despising.
And her trinity, I dare you to make less sense than the trinity she picks.
They're okay.
Yeah.
No.
Who do you think's first?
Hitler.
Well, no, Hitler's the most important, but he's not the first.
Oh, he's not the first.
What?
It goes in order of it goes in order of like time period.
So these are all historical figures.
First one is definitely someone ancient Greek.
No, ancient Egyptian, Akhenaten, the first monotheist, he's generally called.
He was like this pharaoh who declared himself the sun god and like tried to institute monotheism and then he died and everything he did was burned by the people who came after him because they thought he was an asshole.
Okay.
And it's weird because she like hates monotheism so much, but he's like one of the people she loves.
I think just because he's the sun god and she's got a weird.
I was going to say she'll make an exception.
She'll give any sun god a pass, basically.
It's fucking weird.
Second in her holy trinity is Genghis Khan.
What?
Does she give like and here's why?
Why?
It wouldn't make sense.
I mean, basically, the why isn't history's greatest conqueror.
He's a great conqueror, and he's not Christian or Jewish or anything, you know?
Okay.
Yeah.
So Akhenaten is the sun, and the Khan is the lightning.
And Hitler, she believes, combines the best attributes of both.
The Pharaoh's wisdom with the strategic mind of Genghis Khan.
Genghis Khan succeeded in invading Russia during the winter.
So I don't know where you're coming from, Savitri.
This woman is okay.
One of these two knew how to invade Russia, and it was not Hitler.
And then is the third one Hitler, or is there the third is Hitler because he combines the best parts of Akhenaten.
This sounds like a terrible cartoon.
She did not watch this cartoon.
It's wild.
Yeah, it's so dumb.
Yeah, so there's probably a couple of reasons for her obsession with Akhenaten.
For one thing, Akhenaten was deeply revered by the Theosophical Society, which you will remember from our episodes on Anthroposophy.
And the Theosophical Society held a lot of ties also to the Tula Society and all the other weird little occult groups who'd supported the Nazis early on.
Okay.
Akhenaten had been a utopian thinker who'd tried and failed to establish a perfect city.
Goodrich Clark, Savitri's biographer, writes that she saw his sun-worshipping cult as, quote, rejection of all politics that promotes man's interest at a cost to the beauty and abundance of nature, which is just invented by her.
Like, she's yeah, I feel like maybe she's like me and Jack Skellington.
She's just kind of there for the aesthetic and maybe doesn't fully understand what she is all about.
Theosophical Occult Ties00:03:05
Okay.
Akhenaten is for Jack Skellington.
Yeah, that is.
Okay, okay.
Now I'm up.
Now I'm like, I understand this mindset.
If this holy trinity doesn't work for you, consider embracing the holy trinity of the products and services that support this show.
Products, services, and God.
What's the third one?
Each is one and a half of the Trinity.
That's how good both products and services are.
Wow.
Yeah, they add up to three.
Products.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
Nazi Propaganda Origins00:15:06
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfected.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So, God, there's so much to get through with this woman's fucking stupid, stupid fucking beliefs, but they're very important though.
They're stupid and they're also kind of so dumb and complicated.
They're kind of so dumb and complicated.
You get a feeling that she went through a lot of phases.
She's a phases.
They all make sense.
I'll say that.
She's like a gal.
They don't make sense of the fact that they're true, but like based on her history and like the things that she imbibes, they all make.
I can see why she came to these conclusions, but they're super dumb.
They're really dumb.
So the core of her Nazism is a love of nature, which was a big part of actual original Nazism too.
They were very into like natural life and shit and like taking care of the land and animal welfare.
And some of her early books that she wrote when the Nazis were in power, but before she was explicitly a Nazi, like The Impeachment of Man, don't explicitly reference Nazism.
And these books, like The Impeachment of Man, is still kind of popular among chunks of the New Age and environmentalist movements today.
Savitri Devi's passionate writing on animal rights is actually one of the many little roads that exist between the green movement and the neo-Nazi movement.
And it's really fucked up.
Devi herself famously railed against the Allied forces purging Germany of its fascist organization, saying that, quote, you cannot denazify nature.
She believed that nature was fundamentally nationalist, national socialist.
And yeah.
That's a bad take.
I'm going to read a quote from the Englishman of man now.
And I want to remind you: there are people who are like environmentalists who are not Nazis who read this book today and don't really realize what's going on.
A civilization that makes such a ridiculous fuss about alleged war crimes, acts of violence against the actual or potential enemies of one's cause, and tolerates slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories and circuses in the fur industry, infliction and pain upon creatures that can never be for or against any cause, does not deserve to live.
Out with it.
Bless the day it will destroy itself, so that a healthy, hard, frank, and brave, nature-loving, and truth-loving elite of supermen with a life-centered faith, a natural human aristocracy, as beautiful on its own higher level as the four-legged kings of the jungle, might again rise and rule upon its remains forever.
So, again, you see how, because of the kind of stuff she's written, there's these bridges.
She's a big part of why there's bridges between the eco-movement and the Nazi movement.
And there very much are.
On the hard edge of the eco-movement, of the anti-climate change movement, there are Nazis and left-wing activists who kind of increasingly seem like Nazis in a lot of cases, which is not to say that even supporting radical environmental action makes you a Nazi.
It's to say that part of what Savitri achieved is building inroads between these little groups and the Nazi movement.
So now there's a lot of people that get into Nazism through environmentalism, and Savitri Devi is a part of that.
And that's kind of the story we're telling today.
Nazism really knows how to ruin a good thing.
It wasn't as good at it before Savitri Devi.
It's always been a ruiner, but she really took it to new levels.
Oh, good.
As long as she elevated how bad it was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So The Lightning in the Sun, her opus, posits a cyclical view of history.
She believed that time began with a golden age in which it was dominated by the perfect era.
Oh, like a sun god age.
Like a sun god age.
And this degraded slowly into a silver age and then a bronze age.
And both of these worse ages featured increased racial mixing that weakened the Aryans.
They also featured pernicious Jewish influence.
The next age is the Kali Yuga or Dark Age, which Savitri believed the world had already entered into.
She also called this Dark Age the reign of the Jew.
No.
Yeah, the only way out of this dark age was for the man against time, Hitler, to gather up the terrible weapons of the dark age and use them to bring about the return of the golden age, presumably through genocidal purging of non-Aryans and the establishment of a strict racial hierarchy.
Her book was dedicated, quote, to the godlike individual of our times, the man against time, the greatest European of all times, both sun and lightning, saved all the Anaxi.
Yeah, as a tribute of unfailing loyalty and love forever and ever.
God.
You know, there's been a lot said about fan culture.
I don't agree with all of it, but you know, this is a real argument against fan culture.
This is the worst fan culture has ever gone.
I feel comfortable saying that.
This is bad.
This is bad.
This is the worst it can go.
This is bad stand culture.
It's bad, bad, bad.
And even the way that she writes and structures these things, it kind of you can hear that like interest in like ancient history in there because it just sounds like she's kind of connecting these lines that don't actually exist to make it sound like to, I mean, kind of like the way she like arguably maybe lifted some of her own like self-mythologizing from Mein Kampf.
She's just like putting something she wants to say into a familiar framework.
Yeah, it's called syncretism.
This is part of syncretism, is like taking these other things that you like and sticking it onto this thing.
And this is like the main thing she goes down in history for doing to Nazism.
Yeah.
Now, I've had a lot of debates with myself putting this together about how much detail to get into about Savitri's theories.
There's a really dark, very vile world of esoteric Hitlerist fantasy based in large part off of her writing.
And this shit is dangerous.
It spreads a kind of ideological infection that grabs impressionable children primarily in a vice-like grip and turns them into something very dangerous.
And a lot of people have died from this.
And I am not going to, if you're very knowledgeable about this, you will notice there is a lot of things I'm leaving out just because like this is enough to understand it.
And I don't want to just like be spreading weird Nazi propaganda to an audience.
Of, as you said, 100,000 people.
Robert, that is the most merciful thing you've ever done on this entire podcast.
Yeah, it's just too dangerous, in my opinion.
That's good.
Yeah, I agree.
And I don't even know what it is.
It's fucking weird, stupid shit, but yeah.
The last thing that's really important to understand about Savitri Devi's beliefs is that she decided Hitler was what she called, well, she was not the only person.
Other people had the same idea, but she's one of the more prominent ones.
The Kali Yuga, the 10th incarnation of Vishnu.
And she used several segments from August Kubasek's ill-advised book, The Young Hitler I Knew.
Kubasek was Hitler's friend when they were like teenagers.
HBO series.
He wrote a terrible book.
It's valuable because it's the only insight we have in Hitler at that period, but he clearly wrote it to make money.
Is it like my friend Dahmer?
Is it like that?
It's the same vibe of like, this horrible person, yeah, I knew him.
You're like, we were buddies.
Cool.
Yeah, but you also get the feeling that Kubasek didn't really think he was horrible until he, like, he was writing it initially to be a biography that was published under the Nazi regime as like a pro-Hitler piece of propaganda.
Oh, yeah.
And then they lost the war.
And then he just kind of rewrote it so that it could be like, well, now I'm just, I guess I'm just going to explain my evil friend to the Allies.
That is so fucking sinister.
Oh, my God.
I mean, there's a lot of debates to have about Kubasek, but most historians will agree, well, you have to read Kubasek.
You have to take him with like a lot of salt.
Yeah, he's trying to salt.
Dmitri Devi takes him with no salt at all.
And she pulled several passages from his book as like evidence that Hitler was the Kali Yuga and was like channeling fucking Vishnu.
Yeah, it's this woman does not understand shades of gray even remotely.
No.
She's just such okay.
She would have written Shades of Grey, though, if she had been around.
I wish she had.
That's the better world.
As with literally every single person you've ever told me about on this cursed show, Robert, everything would have been better off if people had just channeled their horny energy into fanfiction instead of brutal hate and murder every single time.
Masturbating to fan fiction is the only thing that will save us from the next Hitler.
It will absolutely.
And that's where the Kylo Ren stands come in.
If you know an angry person who spends too much time writing fan fiction under no circumstances, stop them.
The lives that encourage that behavior.
Yeah, the lives that will be saved of Raylo fanfic.
I can't even begin to tell you.
Yeah.
It's good.
Okay.
So this is horrible.
Okay, horrible.
Back to what you were saying that was horrible.
So she like reads Kubasek and she becomes convinced that a couple chunks of that book are evidence that Hitler is channeling Vishnu as the avatar of Vishnu.
Yeah.
Sci-fi.
Yeah, there's like, there are these moments in the book where like Hitler will like that, that Kubizek writes very like purple prosy, where Hitler will like suddenly like in the middle of a conversation, like make some sort of like grand statement about the future.
And it's like, maybe it's true, because he was Hitler, like, it wouldn't be the weirdest thing if Hitler had always been that guy, right?
Sure.
But also Kubizek wrote this well after Hitler, you know, was done with.
And it's entirely possible he was like, people are going to expect him to make grand speeches that are like dark and crazy about them.
the future because he was Hitler and he threw them in there because that's what people were like we don't know.
Yeah um, yeah.
So decades later uh, Savitri Devi would claim that her initial inspiration for the idea that Hitler was the Kali Yuga had come from a conversation she'd had in 1936 with Satyananda Swami, the founder and head of the Hindu mission where she'd worked.
She claims that Satyananda used to say and I'm quoting directly from her writing here, Adolf Hitler is the reincarnation of the god Vishnu.
Vishnu is the aspect of the Hindu trinity who goes to keep things from rushing to destruction, to keep them back, to go on against time.
Time is destruction.
You have to destroy in order to create again.
But there are forces that try to postpone destruction and he said Hitler was the reincarnation of that force.
And he was, he was.
But it's a nice thing to hear, a very refreshing thing to hear from a Hindu sage.
I told him I came here because I'm really a pagan, a worshiper of the sun, and I believe in the pagan reaction of Emperor Julian, and I came to India to get, if possible, a sort of tropical equivalent of what we have had in Europe before Christianity.
And I am not a disciple of any Indian, I'm a disciple of Adolf Hitler, he said.
Good, Adolf Hitler, he's as much a Hindu as any of our Hindus.
He's an incarnation of the god Vishnu probably never happened, but might have.
I mean like that's a very inarticulate yeah, it is, but one of the things that Hindu scholars, who again are generally very critical of a lot all of these claims of Savitri's, will point out.
Some like one of the kind of downsides of sort of this very open aspect of Hindu mythology where it kind of accepts new things and new gods and other religions and like it's a very open canonically in a lot of ways, and so there were a lot of Indians who would have, who very well might have been like, oh okay, you worship Hitler, sure he's probably like this.
Like because like, they're just looking at a way to understand, through their religion, this thing that matters to you.
Like yeah again, who knows?
Um, you'll get different opinions on this depending on who you go to.
Um so yeah, we don't know what's true.
What is important is that after Savitri Devi starts writing about all this shit, a lot of Nazis come to believe it.
In fact, the reeling and wounded remaining Nazis of the West felt like Savitri's occult musings were basically a breath of fresh air, and she spent her middle and later years traveling around and meeting fascists all over the world.
In 1961, she made her first direct connection with the English Neo-Nazis of the British National Party, or BNP.
As the war years receded, further and further away, an international agglomeration of fascist inclined folks began to link up and plan together for a resurgence of Nazism.
Savitri Devi was at the center of it, as this paragraph from Hitler's Priestess illustrates, quote, she lost no time in contacting Andrew Fontaine, the president of the BNP.
A spring camp attended by 20 delegates from European nationalist groups was held on Fontaine's estate at Narfurt at Narford, Norfolk, in May of 1961.
Those present included Robert Lyon, a young leader in the American National States' Rights Party, which violently opposed a segregation in the South, representatives from German neo-Nazi groups, and Savitri Devi.
Another key figure was ex-SS Lieutenant Friedrich Borth.
Born in 1928, this blue-eyed, blonde Austrian Nazi had served in the Luftwaffe and the Waffen-SS.
As a teenage officer, he had commanded an assault group and won the Iron Cross.
After serving a three-year jail sentence in post-war Vienna, he published an SS veteran magazine, Das Kamerad, which was swiftly suppressed by the Soviet authorities.
Thereafter, he was connected with numerous extreme right-wing groups and attended the most international fascist gatherings.
He led the Boom Heimertur Jugend until its banning in 1959 and then branded the Legion Europa, the Austrian section of Theorarts Geon Europe, another international grouping inspired by the French OAS in Algeria and Belgian Rancor over the loss of the Congo.
After a busy schedule of lectures at Narfurt, the participants celebrated their Nordic racial identity with folkish songs and tankards of traditional ale around the campfire.
So you see what's happening here.
Savitri Devi gets pulled into not just neo-Nazi groups and not just old Nazis.
She's meeting with the American States Rights Party.
She's meeting with like these Belgians who are angry that they've lost control of the Congo.
And she's meeting with all these old neo-Nazis and the British National Party and stuff.
Would you say at this point she is out of her depth in terms of, I can't believe you did that.
No.
No.
I did.
No, no, no.
I think she's...
You're saying you didn't blow Belgian microphone what you did.
No, no, no, she's not out of her depth at all.
Catamaran Of Ideology00:07:17
Okay.
She is what she is doing is helping to draw.
She's not the only force doing this, but she's helping to draw these groups together by providing the early, like these are all separate groups, like the cause of desegregation.
Like a lot of racists who don't want America desegregated fought against the Nazis.
She is a part of all these different, like, very far-right groups, including Nazis, coming together and, in a lot of cases, starting to embrace these weird, this weird Nazi religion she's invented as something to unify all of them.
That's what starts to happen in this period.
And that's what's really unique about this period.
These are all groups like the Belgian, like pro-Congolese control of like the Belgium.
Like the Belgians weren't pro-Nazi, but like these Belgians start to get pro-Nazi now because they realize there's like this white identity thing, but also this weird religion that is more attractive to them than actual national socialism would have been.
It's interesting.
I mean, it seems like part of her effectiveness lies in like having so many little bits of things for people to latch on to so that even if you don't agree with the larger ideology, there's a worm on the hook that'll get you in.
That's called syncretism.
That's what syncretism really is.
It's like all these different things kind of like a catamari of ideology with like Nazism at the core, but all these things sticking to it.
And these things get other people stuck to them.
So like, yeah, that's what we start to see happening in the early 1960s.
In 1962, Savitri was in England again for a gathering of worldwide Nazis that included Bastard Pod main character, George Lincoln Rockwell.
Oh, I know this name.
The founder of the American Nazis.
This is how you know it's really bad.
That's like any time.
GLR is in there.
Things are about to get way worse.
Not great.
Okay.
Savitri Devi was one of the signatories for the World Union of National Socialists, a proposed organization to form a quote combat-efficient international apparatus to facilitate a return to Nazi values and the extermination of non-whites from Western nations.
Now, ones wound up being a bust for several reasons, including the fact that Rockwell was almost immediately kicked out of the United Kingdom.
But he and Savitri developed a friendly relationship.
The leader of the American Nazi Party had been on the lookout for a new American fascist religion, something esoteric and enchanting that he could use to draw in new members in a way that National Socialist political theory and unvarnished racism just did not.
And he must have thought the Lightning in the Sun had some potential, for he published an abridged version of the book in the National Socialist World magazine.
The Lightning in the Sun made it over to the U.S.
The Lightning in the Sun, it should be said, could be a YA book that is out right now.
It might be, to be entirely honest.
That YA book might actually be Nazi propaganda hidden as young adult figures.
Which, oh, you can't put it past.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
Much like, for example, the band Ace of Bass.
Wait, what?
Yeah, the Ace of Bass were Nazis.
Did you not hear that?
No.
Oh, Adam Todd Brown read a great article about this for cracked.
The Base of Aces was a Nazi submarine base.
If you watch the music video for All That She Wants is Another Baby, the woman who just wants another baby to get on welfare is like holding a Star of David the entire time, and there's all these long, lingering shots of it.
There's a bunch of other stuff.
The sign that they saw is clearly a swastika.
If you listen to the lyrics, it's fucked up.
Wow.
But we have to blaze past that right now.
I found a book called Lightning on the Sun.
That's pretty close.
It's about a guy.
It's probably Nazi shit.
It's about a guy named Glenn Schmittler's a store.
Yeah, Glenn Schmittler, who might be Nazi.
A moon god.
Yep, that's some Nazi shit.
There it is.
Or anti-Nazi, since Savitri was all about the sun god.
It could be either, really.
So Savitri Devi would go on to spend the bulk of her remaining years in India, traveling irregularly when the demands of her national socialist beliefs took her around the world.
She remained convinced all her life that Hitler would return, either in a new incarnation or after revealing that he had somehow survived the war and lead a resurgent Nazism to global victory.
She retired in 1970, living for a time at the home of her friend, François Dior in England.
That's the Dior you're thinking of.
Really?
Yeah, it's, well, it's like the daughter, I think, of the woman who created the line.
Yeah, maybe my daughter.
Oh, good.
She was a big Nazi backer before the war.
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
Learning more.
I love fashion knowledge.
Savitri Devi was kicked out of Dior's house eventually for her twin habits of refusing to bathe ever and chewing on garlic constantly.
Coe.
Disgusting.
Come on, girl.
Okay.
That's what gets the reaction, Sophie.
She's terrible.
Ah, my son.
I was chewing on garlic a lot over the summer.
It helps preserve your voice.
I don't think that's why she was doing that.
It does.
But you have to bathe while chewing on garlic.
Do we know what happened to her cats?
Oh, solid question, Jamie.
Well, she had numerous pet cats.
What happened to those 20 cats that she left to go to Nazi Germany with?
I was just about to say she spent most of her remaining years living alone in India with dozens sometimes of pet cats and at least one cobra.
She always had a fuckload of cats.
Yeah.
This woman couldn't get away from her cats.
I'm not sure if that's a good idea.
There's one thing about her that wasn't all.
I think that cats live long enough that the original 20 cats she left behind would still be alive.
I think a lot of them were.
I think a lot of them weren't.
Oh, she was taking them with?
I don't know precisely, but my assumption based on everything I know of Savitri Devi is that she would have absolutely tried to get back her original cats if it was possible.
She was very into cats.
Yeah.
Okay, well.
She would not have abandoned the cats, I don't think.
She was real consistent about that part.
Yeah.
As she grew older, Devi became more and more convinced that the United States represented the most fertile ground for the growth of the esoteric Nazi religion she had spent her life helping to construct.
In 1982, she decided to travel to the United States to do what she could do to help American Nazism break out as a national force.
She died on the way while staying at a friend's house in Great Britain.
Her ashes, however, finally made it across the pond to the United States of America, and American Nazis laid her to rest by sprinkling her on their hero's grave, George Lincoln Rockwell.
So Rockwell and Savitri Devi share a grave.
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
So she's like, okay.
Yeah.
You know who doesn't share a grave with George Lincoln Rockwell and Savitri Devi.
The products and services we're about to hawk?
Yes.
For now, you never know.
For now.
Ashes On Rockwell's Grave00:02:18
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
Esoteric Hitlerism Explained00:15:30
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
We're back.
So, Savitri Devi's dead.
Finally.
But this is not the end for her.
Not really.
Because starting in the late 1970s, a famous Holocaust denier and publisher, Ernst Zundel, had found her old work and started pushing it back into circulation.
Now, it had only developed a limited audience in those early post-war days, but now, nearly 20 years later, people were ready for esoteric Hitlerism.
The book Hitler's Priestess notes, by the late 1970s, the historical experience of the Third Reich was quickly receding into the past.
As popular literature and films ably demonstrated, Nazism was becoming something mythical, even fantastic, and also plastic that could be molded and combined with novel associations.
Sounds like an 80s lyrics.
By publishing the work of Savitri Devi, Zundel aimed to create a new cultic interest in Hitler, linking him to ancient mysteries, the world of nature, and powerful religious symbols drawn from the Orient.
See, she was just saying that by saying it's plastic, because he's pointing out, we have all these weird movies now about like Nazis on the moon.
You know, you've got these fanciful stories like Wolfenstein, these games about like Nazi, like all of this, this, this fictional sort of world that's been built up, like mythology built up around the Nazis.
Usually not by people who are actual Nazis.
In a lot of cases, just by people who are like, well, they're the worst people ever, so I can make them the bad guys.
That's an easy go for a bad guy.
Sure.
But Zundel is like, this is a fucking opportunity because kids are growing up reading about these cool, evil, bad guy Nazis.
And for the same reason that kids love dressing up as Imperial stormtroopers from Star Wars, kids get interested in the Nazis from this.
And he sees Savitri Devi's work as like, I can fucking get a shitload of kids interested in Nazism by pushing this stuff back out there.
Oh, boy.
And he's fucking right.
Yeah.
Now, yeah.
Another important architect of this whole thing, and who we're not going to get into enough, but I will do an episode on in the future, is a Chilean Nazi named Miguel Serrano.
And it's from Miguel that we actually get the term esoteric Hitlerism.
Serrano and Devi seem to have reached essentially the same conclusion about Hitler as an avatar of Vishnu through slightly different intellectual roots.
Miguel was a student of Jung and a Mithraist, which we just don't have enough time to get into, and a member of the Miguels.
The Theosophical Society.
He was also an early avid Western practitioner of yoga.
Miguel corresponded with Devi during her lifetime.
Before he died in 2009, he gave interviews to Nazi magazines with names like Black Sun, where he said this about Savitri Devi.
Quote, Savitri Devi is the greatest warrior after Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, and Joseph Goebbels.
Moreover, she was the first to discover the ancient and spiritual power behind Hitlerism.
She envisioned a new religion and inaugurated a sanctuary for Hitler in India.
She was, as I myself am, anti-Christian.
She initiated completely on her own all that I have developed up until now.
It is not mere coincidence that the Spanish Catholics published an attack against Savitri Devi, Otto Rahn, and me.
It was very late in her life when we started to write each other.
We just missed each other in Europe.
By one week, I arrived a few days after her death.
I think that Savitri Devi will be the greatest sister of all the priests of esoteric Hitlerism, the priests of Wotan.
And he's like wearing a male feminist t-shirt while he does this.
He's like, I don't hate women.
I like this.
I like the worst woman I've ever heard of.
Love.
He would not have worn a male.
I will say that much.
But you're getting the spirit of the guy, right?
He's a real gigantic piece of shit.
We're not getting into it up, but he gives her credit as like the real motive force behind the religion that Hitlerism becomes.
Even though he's also like kind of independently coming to a lot of the same conclusions and even earlier in some cases, like she's the popularizer in a lot of ways.
She has a big role in that.
And yeah, we'll talk about him more later.
Today, Savitri Devi's fingerprints can be found all over the radical and murderous chunks of the fascist right.
The Fwehrkrieg Division, an accelerationist neo-Nazi organization that's very similar to Adam Woffen Division, similar enough to talk about for the purposes of this podcast.
Both of them seek to bring about the violent destruction of the current world order through destabilizing attacks.
The Fwehrkrieg division directly cites Devi as an inspiration.
The group's Gab bio includes this Devi quote, Creation and destruction are one to the eyes of one who can see beauty.
Savitri's beliefs went on to have a big influence on Adam Woffen too and the members of the base who weren't FBI agents, anti-fascists, or journalists, which is basically those seven guys you got arrested.
I was going to say, that's a familiar idea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know it's in these groups like the base that we can see some hint of what makes Savitri Devi so dangerous.
The leader of the Michigan Cell of Adam Waffen Division, who was doxxed a few days before I wrote this episode, reached his position in charge of the Michigan cell when he was 15 years old.
The three members of the base who were arrested in Georgia in the process of trying to spark a race war were ages 19, 21, and 25 respectively.
These accelerationist esoteric Hitlerists tend to be young.
And there is disagreement on the average age at which people enter cults, but the work of Dr. John G. Clark, a psych professor at Harvard who surveyed 500 current and former cult members, suggests an average age of 19 and a half for new cult members.
He also points out that most new cult members are male.
This is because young men are particularly vulnerable to being enraptured by ideologies that offer them a sense of purpose and belonging.
It's one of the reasons the same age group is the ideal recruitment population for soldiers.
But esoteric Hitlerism doesn't just suck these kids in because they're young.
And to explain this new part, I'm going to have to talk a little bit about Keckism.
And I am very sorry.
Do we absolutely...
Is it absolutely not?
Yeah, we really do.
Keckism started out as a joking parody of religion invented by the shitposters.
4chan and 8-chan during Gamergate.
It's very dumb, and talking about it makes me feel very silly.
But the short of it is, Kekism started out, and for probably most people still is, a dumb gag and a way for them to make fun of members of minority groups by pretending to be members of a victimized religion because they think that's funny.
The whole thing focuses around shitposting and spreading memes, but as the Trump campaign ramped up and this weird internet movement started to have an impact on the real world, some particularly unhinged Anon started to take Keckism more seriously, while others just thought the joke kept getting funnier and spread it around for that reason.
Lawrence Murray, a writer for the fascist podcast, The Right Stuff, was probably the first person to purposefully meld Kekism with Savitri Devi's philosophy into something he called esoteric Kekism.
He started shitting out memes that replaced Hitler with Pepe as an avatar of Vishnu, stuff like that.
It's very dumb.
When interviewed, Murray claims he was only half joking with the whole idea.
But like any joke of the sort on the internet, it spread like wildfire and a certain chunk of the people who saw it took it seriously, which led them to the work of more serious fascist thinkers, people like Savitri Devi, and what led some of them into accelerationist groups like Adam Woffen and the base.
It is not a coincidence that Anders Breivik, the Utoya Norway shooter who massacred dozens of children at a left-wing summer camp, directly praised Hindu nationalism in his manifesto.
It is also not a total coincidence that both Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter, claim to be Knights Templar, members of a Christian order fighting against Muslims, basically.
And it is not a coincidence that the urban dictionary page for Kekism, written by a Gamergator, describes it as a red-pilled ideology originating from the true Knights Templar.
And again, all of this is joking.
All of this is not joking.
It's both at once.
It's the contradiction of modern fucking yeah.
Well, that's, yeah, the greatest trick the devil ever played was irony poisoning because you just can't you can't argue with it.
Yeah.
Some people will say, and it's possible there is, are some central figures behind this spread of syncretism, like sinister individuals who have like kind of put all this together purposefully or at least put pieces of it together purposefully.
Yeah.
But I tend to be of the belief that most, if not all of it, is amorphous and acephalous.
It happened without a head, without much intention on its own.
There may have been bits of intention here and there, like esoteric Kekism, but a lot of it just happened because of the sort of structure Savitri Devi built.
It's just kind of the natural result of the amorphous and sticky nature of the faith that she created.
If Hindu mythology and ancient Egyptian history can be folded in with Adolf Hitler and the Aryan myth, why can't Kekism wind up in there too?
Why can't the Knights Templar fit in there too?
All these weird little subcultures.
You've got Norse mythology, Chan culture, gamer culture, New Age spiritualism, environmentalism, even veganism.
All these things appeal heavily to a lot of young people.
And the more little bridges that you can build between these different communities and actual exterminationist Nazi beliefs, the more young men will kind of accidentally fall in and get caught in this net.
It's like a tunnel spider's web.
And at the end, the great innovation Savitri Devi brought, like, that's the innovation she brought to Nazism.
She took what was a dead political system that couldn't spread outside of Germany, not really, and turned it into a living syncretic religion, something with vitality, something capable of mutating and absorbing and staying relevant, and something capable of inspiring young men to commit murder in the memory of Adolf Hitler nearly a century after his death.
Could you give me that word one more time of the syncretism?
Syncretism.
Yeah.
I mean, and if you are able to, you know, find a way to get a group of people who are looking for something to believe in, who are maybe a little bit, okay, you know what?
You're right.
I was.
But yeah, just like finding a group of vulnerable people ideologically that need something to believe in and put a delicious chocolate coating on the outside of it.
It seems to work.
It works.
It works.
Yeah.
So.
How do you feel about Savitri?
You a fan?
You got to check out her books?
I can't say I'm a fan.
I don't think that we would have.
I don't think we would have been friends in junior high, and I don't think we would have been friends now.
Yeah, no, I mean, I truly, and it is interesting that we don't talk about her.
I had no idea this person existed.
I. Why do you think that is?
There's a degree to which I think a lot of people who know about her and are like researchers didn't really want to, because there's this worry about making a bigger deal of it than it is.
Sure.
It's kind of like I didn't really write about Ait-Chan much until the Christchurch shooting when it was like, okay, well, now we gotta.
That's too big for me.
Like after the base, now it's gotten to this point.
It's like, all right, we gotta fucking talk about Savitri Devi and esoteric Hitlerism.
Like we gotta get some of this out there.
I do think it's also just like not super well known.
I think she was seen, like really, to be entirely honest, I think most of her efforts would have looked like a failure to most of Zerber's observers up until maybe at the earliest a decade ago.
Okay.
You know, people who were really aware of what was going on would have known earlier.
But most people, even pretty well-informed people, would have been like, well, this is kind of a dead end and just something to like make fun of up until we start to the internet, really, is what provides this with the last ingredient it needs to take off.
Yeah, she like pioneered the red pill mentality.
Like, it's yeah, she's a big part of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we're not like Julius Evola is a big part of this, who Steve Bannon fucking loves.
There's a lot of space.
Let's not take away any credit from any of the red pill pioneers.
Everyone deserves to take up space.
We'll get them all.
We'll get them all on the show.
We will.
We will.
They deserve it.
Well, Robert, as usual, this was absolutely horrifying, and you've ruined my day.
Thank you.
Good.
Yeah.
That's the goal.
Okay, good.
Well, Anderson's here for you, though.
Oh, Andy.
I've got some pluggables to plug.
You can listen to my podcast, My Year in Mensa.
It's online now.
There's only four episodes.
It's real quick.
I'm on Twitter at Jamie LoftusHelp, Instagram at JamieCarrSuperstar.
On tour for the next month or so, JamieLoftisisInnocent.com.
And that's what I have to say.
I love when we talk about the worst shit in the entire world.
And at the end, you're like, so what's your Twitter handle?
This is normal to me.
Where's you in the Twits?
If you really want to learn more about esoteric Hitlerism, follow Sophie's Twitter account.
Why underscore Sophie underscore Y. Absolutely violent, Robert.
You cannot shut Sophie up about it.
Don't make me fire you.
No.
Oh, my gosh.
So much, Hitler.
You know what?
Have been on Twitter for less than 48 hours, already getting accused of crimes.
Robert's going to be canceled by the time this came out because he blew his nose on the mic no less than four times four hours.
I am ill.
You're ill.
I know, but you, but I mean, now you're just, now you're just bragging about it.
Follow our podcast at BastardsPod on Instagram.
Don't tell me what to do.
So, oh, sorry.
You're telling your listeners what to do.
Robert.
For fuck's sake, get it together.
I know.
I didn't sleep last night.
And the episode.
Nobody.
I mean, I see.
You know what ends in this night?
I know we've had the Nazis.
Damn it.
She didn't sleep last night.
Does that excuse the noseblowing?
My friend having trouble sleeping.
Does it excuse the noseblowing?
No.
No.
Robert.
Robert.
Noseblowing Scandal00:02:31
Sophie.
Robert.
That's going to be okay.
Yes.
It is not.
Robert's getting mad.
End the episode, my friend, and go take a nap.
Yeah.
The episode is over.
Yay.
Go hug a cat.
Or a dog.
Can you stop Nazis?
Hug my children.
Hug a cat.
And encourage the angriest person you know to write fan fiction.
That's truly the greatest service you can do.
Both of those things are critical.
Yeah.
All right.
Episode's over.
Bye.
Bye.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
If you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Ray Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.