Gold in the Furnace

by Savitri Devi

  How is it so? And how is it that so many other political, social, and religious changes have taken place, in this and other continents, without leaving a trace, save upon the externals of life? The answer is simple. The other political movements, even the great religions ancient and modern, have all accepted as a matter of course—or tried to conceal—the tragic fact of man’s physical decay, as though nothing indeed could be done about it, and have striven to cultivate man’s personality, to raise man’s ethical or spiritual level, or even his mere material standard of life in spite of that fact—which is absurd.

  All recipes for the moral, intellectual, spiritual, or merely social development of a physically decaying humanity are humbug. Like other “quack” remedies, they are, at the most, fit to fill the pockets or to advertise the otherwise worthless names of those who put them forward. If physical decay be irredeemable; if race, even when slightly weakened or vulgarised, can never be restored—if even a little poison can never be eliminated from the racial body—then there is only one solution to the human problem: extinction; only one ideal to be upheld, with utmost vigour: the monastic ideal; only one request to be made, or rather only one order to be given to men and women before they sink to the level of perverse apes: “Cease breeding, and leave this planet as soon as possible!—Die in dignity, while you still perhaps retain enough of your ancestral nobility to feel that death imposes itself as the only tolerable future; death, rather than endless degradation.”

  If not—if there is hope for man—then salvation should be sought not in the social, economic, moral, or spiritual uplift of the degenerate as they are, but first and foremost in an arrest of degeneracy; in a return to health, without which there is no morality, no spirituality, no beauty, nothing worth living for. It should be sought in a world-wide policy of systematic healthy birth and healthy life but, before all, in a policy of healthy birth and life applied to the natural leading race of the world, the Aryan, of which the decay, if definitive, would mean the greatest disaster from the human point of view. Our Führer has expressed all this far better than I or anyone else can do, in that magnificent Chapter 11 of the first part of Mein Kampf, which contains the kernel of our eternal philosophy. With the stirring eloquence of clear, objective truth allied to unshakable conviction, he has advocated that ruthless policy of purification and strengthening of the Aryan race—that regulation of man’s sexual life with a view to the birth of healthy children of pure blood—which it is the glory of the National Socialist régime to have carried out. It is the only sensible policy, in alternative to that of systematic extinction. And it is the only policy that can—that must—result in the re-creation of a humanity which the out-and-out artist can admire and love without reservations.

  * * *

  There is a curious and, in my eyes, a very significant fact in religious history—a fact which nobody, up till now, as far as I know, seems to have noticed. Of the two great religions of India, Brahminism and Buddhism—the two typical products of the Aryan mind in a tropical environment—the former is nothing else but the eternal creed of blood purity and racial hierarchy—our creed—applied to a land of many races; and the latter is the most pitilessly consistent religion of extinction that man has ever conceived at the sight of irredeemable decay.

  And while, in spite of all attempts to suppress it, from without, or to mar it from within, the race policy embodied in the immemorial caste system, has preserved in India, to this day, an extremely small, indeed, but still worthy blood aristocracy—the southernmost and easternmost outpost of Aryan humanity in the world—the policy of extinction has failed lamentably. For alone, or nearly alone, those individuals of the superior races who adhered to it, carried it out to its end, with all the courage and thoroughness natural to them.167 To the millions of Untermenschen who gradually came to be labelled Buddhists, in the length and breadth of Asia, the great religion of non-violence and chastity soon meant nothing but a mere ritual, and a mythology, without any bearing upon their lives. No philosophy can teach the Untermenschen to stop breeding. Wherever their number should be kept down, it is the business of sterilisation, not of religion, to see to it. The countless multitude and the poor quality of the professed followers of the most logical religion of extinction in the world, today, after two thousand five hundred years, proves this only too well. The main result of the preaching of a philosophy of extinction on a worldwide scale, would be to reduce in number the superior races, making place for the unrestricted increase of the inferior ones, and their mastery over the whole earth; in other words, to lower the human level and to create, not nothingness, but ugliness; not a world in which beautiful wild beasts would prowl alone in the re-grown forests, over the dust of forgotten towns, but . . . Chinese slums and Indian “bustees.”

  The philosophy of extinction can therefore only express the individual attitude of those men and women who have lost all hope in life’s possibilities and all interest in material man. It is merely the outcome of one’s personal determination not to contribute to the continuation of a doomed world, not to allow one’s own blood to lose itself into the general stream of decay. It provides no practical solution for the human problem which is, ultimately, the problem of the survival of the superior races. And the struggle for the maintenance or restoration of pure blood—our struggle—remains the only course.

  As far as I know, this course has been seriously taken only twice in the long history of our race: in ancient India, some six thousand years ago, when the newly settled Aryan invaders from the North, bearers of a culture entirely different from that of the civilised natives, first became aware of the dangers of blood contamination and invented the caste system, or—if it already existed, as some scholars think—remoulded it upon a racial basis,168 in order to keep themselves pure and worthy of their recently acquired overlordship of the southern subcontinent; and in our times in National Socialist Germany. In the first instance, it resulted in the extraordinary preservation of Aryan blood and culture in an immense tropical land—nearly as large as Europe—densely inhabited by four hundred million people of different non-Aryan stocks, from the most primitive Negroid169 or Mongoloid tribes170 to the highly evolved Dravidians. In the second instance, out of the desperate Germany of the 1920s, it raised a fully conscious aristocracy of blood, the world’s real élite, which even a second disaster of far greater magnitude than the first, was unable to subdue or to demoralise.

  The former, however, is no mean achievement in world history. And one must, perhaps, have lived in a land of many races—and especially in times like ours, when equalitarian teachings have infected the whole of the earth—to realise to its full the greatness of National Socialism. To most Europeans, still devoid of racial consciousness, the eleventh chapter of Mein Kampf (if they have read it at all) means nothing but an expression of “Hitler’s prejudices.” To most of us, it means hardly more than beautiful, uplifting pages, of which the truth can be proved only in the antagonism of Aryan and Jew. To me, it means that, no doubt, and much more. It evokes memories of the few and far apart tropical outposts of the Aryan race; outlandish scenes: a simple and spotlessly clean whitewashed room in a thatched cottage in some village of Bengal (or of South India, where the contrast between Aryan and non-Aryan is still more glaring) and in that room, a white clad man, one of the few Brahmins of the village, hardly darker—and sometimes fairer—than an Italian or many Frenchmen, with generally brown, but sometimes grey or greyish-blue eyes, and the self-same features as any pure Aryan of Europe. And that man quotes to me verses from the Rig-Veda, from the songs that the Aryan bards once sang to the glory of the Gods of Light and Life, the “Shining Ones,” already before the race came to India; the songs in which allusions are made to those wonders of the still cherished distant Arctic Home, the Northern Lights.171 And the modern language he speaks (if in Bengal) is a neo-Sanskrit language, closely related, through its roots, to German and English, Greek and Latin—an Aryan language. And the rites of his religion are those o
f the hallowed Northerners, and the legitimate pride that he feels as a Brahmin—a member of India’s highest caste—is their racial pride, surviving in the midst of a foreign environment, through the narrow but uninterrupted stream of pure blood, for six thousand years. And I recall, also, the foreign environment, all round the peaceful cottage: the darker men and women of varied racial types, with features entirely different from those of the Brahmin, going along the dusty, burning hot road, with burdens upon their heads or working in the rice fields; or collecting the village refuse—the multifarious levels of hierarchised mankind, from the honoured castes immediately below the Brahmins, down to the meanest “untouchables”; levels that do not correspond to different shades of wealth, but only to a greater or lesser proportion of real or supposed Aryan blood (of which the lower castes are entirely devoid).

  The culture reflected in the songs of the Rig-Veda, and in the warrior-like philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, which the Brahmin has kept alive, is the only ancient Aryan culture that has resisted victoriously, to this day, the impact of both Christianity and Islam, i.e., the two great religions of human equality, sprung from Judaism. The Aryan who brought it to the tropics kept it, nay, stamped it upon the multitudes of India forever, first because he kept himself—kept his blood—pure against all odds, threatening with the severest penalty—not loss of life, but loss of caste, with all that this means in India—anyone who would become guilty of the sin of interbreeding. And to the extent to which he failed to avoid that deadly sin, the culture has become “fossilised,” to repeat an expression used by the Führer in the eleventh chapter of Mein Kampf; stultified; for all practical purposes dead.

  During my numerous years in India, how many times have I not remembered whole passages of Hitler’s famous book, at the sight of the living realities resulting from the existence of an Aryan minority amongst a teeming non-Aryan population; at the sight of that traditional reverence of the non-Aryan for the Aryan in the old caste ridden land—reverence expressed in the small things of daily life and in the very spirit of current language: in the fact, for instance, that relatively fair skin is a very great qualification in a marriageable Indian girl of any caste; or that, in all the languages of India, the words arya and anarya have both a racial and a moral connotation, arya meaning “noble” and anarya, “ignoble,” “infamous.”

  How many times have I not marvelled at the worship of the deified Aryan hero, Rama, by India’s multitudes of all races, to this day! And, standing against a stone pillar, in one of the gorgeous temples of the far South, in the midst of the smoke of incense and the outlandish music of drums and flutes, how many times have I not shut my eyes, and let my thoughts wander back to distant Europe where Adolf Hitler had risen to power and was building up a new civilisation upon the age-old idea of Aryan supremacy! I watched the graceful Indian women walk along the endless pillared corridors, bearing offerings in large brass plates, their black hair adorned with jasmine flowers. Would the golden-haired daughters of the North learn again one day to worship Aryan Gods? All my life I had longed that they would. Anyhow, they were already learning again to revere in themselves and in their handsome, pure-blooded countrymen, the impersonal divinity of the Race. And that was the main thing. The rest would come afterwards.

  * * *

  The second historic achievement of the undying Weltanschauung of racial purity, namely the creation of new Germany—or rather the formation of the kernel of new “Aryandom”—is perhaps even greater than the first. Greater, I say, for it is more difficult to revive the spirit of a people after a pernicious foreign system of religious beliefs, philosophy, and ethics, has marred it for over one and a half millenniums, than to keep it alive in the midst of foreign multitudes that have accepted, or at least that respect, nay, reverence, the values that it has created. Greater, also, for that miracle has been realised through the genius and superhuman willpower, and love, of one Man—Adolf Hitler.

  It is true that, even in its well-known political form, National Socialism is older than most people think; that, as early as 1904—when Hitler was yet only fifteen—Hans Krebs had gathered the best Germanic elements of what the Western Democracies have later christened Czechoslovakia into a party forwarding the same immediate aims, and bearing the same name as the immortal NSDAP, into which it finally merged. But it is and will remain Hitler’s everlasting glory to have stressed before the modern Aryan world the philosophical and—I am tempted to say, however strange that might seem at first to many—the religious contents of National Socialism; to have conceived and proclaimed the Weltanschauung of pure blood not merely from the point of view of tragic emergency, but from that of eternity. And that is why we hail in him the inspired promoter of the Western resurrection, nay, the Saviour of the whole Aryan race. Other German patriots with a right vision of the same political realities, have founded parties. He has created the youth of new Germany; awakened the best elements in the country to a new consciousness; made Germany worthy, in fact, to take the lead of the Aryan world—worthier than ever, now, inasmuch as she has remained faithful to him and his principles all through these years of persecution. Above all, he has forced the most racially conscious among the foreign Aryans to welcome Germany’s leadership, nay, to desire it, and—if they are consistently sincere—to fight for it; as I have once already said before, he has made Germany a holy land in their eyes. Apart from a very few within the National Socialist minority, the Germans themselves do not seem to realise this sufficiently.

  I have mentioned the splendid youth of new Germany. All great movements put stress upon the training of youth. “Catch them young,” say the Jesuits. National Socialism has not merely “caught them young,” but has striven to create them; to prepare them, not only from childhood, or from birth, but from the very moment of conception, to be the embodiment of the highest idea of all-round manly perfection—of physical health and beauty; of moral health and beauty; of character; of sound and clear intelligence, firmly linked up with the whole of life; the human élite, from every point of view. No other Movement has harped with such insistence upon the fact that all education is a sheer waste of time without the primary physical foundation of a noble body, and that nobility is God-ordained, not man-made, residing as it does in one’s descent not necessarily from a titled ancestor, but surely from healthy ascendants of unmixed Aryan stock. No political movement, and hardly any religion—save the ancient Aryan religion still alive in India—has ever taught its followers so emphatically that the act of life, far from being an amusement, is an all-important, an extremely serious thing; a holy rite, in which two individuals become the actual link between the whole past of the race and its future, priest and priestess of Everlasting Life; an act which the strong, the healthy, the worthy, the men and women without blemish should alone be allowed to perform, if it is not to become a mockery and a blasphemy.

  To have dared to stress this truth, and, which is more, to have dared to have enforced laws taking it fully into account, in a world that had forgotten it for the last two thousand years; to have had the courage to proclaim that the union in beauty of two young and healthy people of pure blood, whether sanctioned by a ceremony or not, is something commendable, while the marriage of an Aryan to a man or woman of another race or the union of two people of any race (including pure Aryans) if one or both be unhealthy, is a crime, however much the Christian or any other equalitarian, individualistic, and otherworldly faith might condone it; to have emphasised this as a guiding principle in the government of a great state, encouraging the sterilisation of the unfit, the painless elimination of the dregs of humanity, and strongly forbidding all shameful unions whether on grounds of health or of race, that, I say, is something for which a sane world should be everlastingly grateful to National Socialism. The universal blame which, on the contrary, we got for upholding those measures and the conception of life at the back of them, only proves to what a degree of degradation the whole world—and indeed the Aryan race—has sunk, under the long-
drawn influence of such a man-centred creed as Christianity and of the ideologies of “liberty” and equality that in fact prolong its spirit, even if they pretend to stand against it, as some of them do. It only proves the enormity of the physical as well as moral decay of the Western world—for only sickly people can sincerely object to drastic measures for the restoration of the health of their own race.

  This reminds me of the words addressed to me in 1946, by one of the finest Englishmen I know, a sincere National Socialist who had then just been released after six years’ internment under the 18B Act.172 “What can one expect of those millions of imbeciles?” the gentleman said, speaking of the majority of his countrymen. “Who are they, that they could act or think differently? The products of a drunken Saturday night’s lust, most of them; and the remainder a bastardised lot, intermixed with Jews. What can one expect? If one really wants an élite, one has to breed it systematically, as they did in Germany.”

  Yes, when most men of our times speak of an “élite” they mean what they call a “moral” or “intellectual” élite. We mean an all-round one—and first and foremost a physical one. We know that there is no such thing as a “moral” or “intellectual” élite which is not at the same time physical.