Speaker 1: What's esoteric my Hitler isms ship that is two Hitler
Speaker 1: starts in a row. Jesus, well it fits with this episode.
Speaker 1: This is Behind the Bastards podcast about the worst people
Speaker 1: in all of history. I'm Robert Evans, I'm the host
Speaker 1: and my guest today is Jamie him one name. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm the Beyonce of No Billy Wayne's the Beyonce behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards. Yeah, you are the podcaster formerly known as
Speaker 1: the Beyonce behind the Bastards. Yeah, they're the Beyonce of
Speaker 1: my heart. Thank you. Yeah, there we go, Here we go. Jamie,
Speaker 1: how are you doing today? I'm good. I'm good. I uh,
Speaker 1: I think that that's true. I'm good. I have to
Speaker 1: add I have to add it probably good. I have
Speaker 1: to add a bag to my Spirit Airlines flight. But
Speaker 1: that's about as as challenging as it's getting to day.
Speaker 1: Speaking of monsters, that is the greatest monster of all
Speaker 1: online interface. You had to like swipe your credit card
Speaker 1: if you sneeze on a Spirit our Lines. I have
Speaker 1: this friend, his name is Lenny, and he listens to
Speaker 1: the podcast so he may hear this. And Lenny is
Speaker 1: uh one of the one of the most experienced travelers
Speaker 1: I know, and at one point I was taking a
Speaker 1: flight with him in Eastern Europe to Ukraine through whizz Air,
Speaker 1: which is one of the worst airlines I've heard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're terrible. Never had the pleasure. There was a moment
Speaker 1: where they started hassling us about our bags, and it
Speaker 1: became clear that we weren't going to be able to
Speaker 1: like fit everything like that, we were going to have
Speaker 1: to take stuff out. And the line from him that
Speaker 1: I'll never forget was I guess, well, I guess I'm
Speaker 1: wearing all my pants today. I've heard multiple pairs of
Speaker 1: fans on how if you're not going on to a
Speaker 1: Spirit Airlines flight wearing five jackets? Like, what are you
Speaker 1: even you yourself? I've been on a Spirit Airlines right
Speaker 1: eye next to like an actively drunk person multiple times.
Speaker 1: That's just normal, I know. But yeah, you're right, you
Speaker 1: haven't wept. If you haven't wept and thrown things away,
Speaker 1: well waiting to get in line at Spirit Airlines, have
Speaker 1: you even have flown? We've gotten off topic, Um, very
Speaker 1: off topic, Jamie. Yes, have you ever heard of Savitri Devi?
Speaker 1: Oh good, oh boy, Jamie, you are in for a
Speaker 1: motherfucking treat. I love when you don't tell me in advance. Okay, Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is one I'm going to guess almost nobody listening
Speaker 1: to has heard of. But she's one of the most
Speaker 1: important people for understanding where we are right now in
Speaker 1: the year um like the most the most recent headline
Speaker 1: that ties directly to is you remember when the FBI
Speaker 1: arrested all those members of the base, that that neo
Speaker 1: Nazi group that's plenty to start a second Civil War
Speaker 1: by randomly firing into a crowd in Virginia that was
Speaker 1: full of armed people, that whole, that whole hullabaloo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well she's kind of behind all that, although she died
Speaker 1: decades before it happened. So that's today's story. Let's do it.
Speaker 1: So now, Jamie, we're gonna start like we start every
Speaker 1: good day by talking about our old buddy. Shouldn't call
Speaker 1: him a buddy, Adolf Hitler. It's weird because I can
Speaker 1: call Stalin a buddy, but I feel like calling Hitler
Speaker 1: a buddies a bridge too far. I don't know. On
Speaker 1: this show. I feel like they are just rules that
Speaker 1: are different. Yeah, they're they're old friends. At this point,
Speaker 1: so Hitler was he was a secular ruler, Jamie. Um,
Speaker 1: he was not a not a not a not a
Speaker 1: like I think, I think there's a lot of misconceptions
Speaker 1: about kind of the nature of his power and like
Speaker 1: his regime because of all of these like History Channel
Speaker 1: documentary is in this industry of books on Nazi occult
Speaker 1: history and like Nazi magic and the hell Boy movies.
Speaker 1: But like to hear it, yeah yeah, I mean they're
Speaker 1: great movies, at least one of them is. But um,
Speaker 1: like this idea that like, you know, the Nazis were
Speaker 1: like full full of magic, right, and that Hitler like
Speaker 1: believed all sorts of like weird cookie occult stuff about
Speaker 1: like raising the dead and aliens and ship and it's
Speaker 1: just not true. Um, there were some funky occult ties
Speaker 1: to national socialism, but they were phrase oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, cult ties, yeah baby yeah, But they weren't
Speaker 1: to Hitler. They were too like kind of like side figures.
Speaker 1: Like the B List of the Nazis. A lot of
Speaker 1: those guys were kind of into the occult. But like
Speaker 1: your A listers, really we're we're pretty secular. Guy Beyonce
Speaker 1: is the Nazi. Beyonce is I'm trying to think of
Speaker 1: like like the Nazi Jeremy Renners, the halls. Oh, how
Speaker 1: dare you speak is name in this forum? I thought
Speaker 1: we was. We made a pact to never speak of
Speaker 1: him again. We we never signed that contract. We never did.
Speaker 1: It was under negotiation for a long time. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: is still in arbitration now. The Tulist Society UH spelled
Speaker 1: Thule Society like the top racks on people's jeeps? Was it? Well,
Speaker 1: subers people suberus um. The Tolist Society was a German
Speaker 1: occult group in the early twentieth century UH in Germany UM,
Speaker 1: and it provided some of the early funding and leadership
Speaker 1: for the Nazi Party. Heinrich Hitler held bizarre quasi magical
Speaker 1: beliefs for his whole time in power, and he was
Speaker 1: kind of into some weird He thought he was like
Speaker 1: a reincarnated prince and some ship. But Hitler himself was
Speaker 1: not at all into a cult stuff um. And the
Speaker 1: only guy really close to him who was was Rudolf Hess,
Speaker 1: who was his deputy and for a long time his
Speaker 1: best friend. This is the guy he like co wrote
Speaker 1: mind comp with like Hess and Hitler like fucking type
Speaker 1: before Hitler ghost his his like his ghostwriter, yeah, kind
Speaker 1: of like more like his his muse. Yeah. And also
Speaker 1: the guy who was a competent typist both. I mean,
Speaker 1: you got you gotta if your muse is also a
Speaker 1: competent typist who says the perfect person doesn't exist, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Rudolf hess That's what people say about Rudolph Hess is
Speaker 1: he was the perfect person. So he was also the
Speaker 1: deputy fearer for a while. Oh six six six six six. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was a cool dude, um, but he wasn't really
Speaker 1: in the picture for very long. He got increasingly marginalized
Speaker 1: after Hitler came to power in thirty three. Um, and
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty one he kind of went bug fuck
Speaker 1: uh and got on a plane and flew to Great
Speaker 1: Britain while the two countries were at war. Sorry, how
Speaker 1: would you define bug fuck? I would have defined bug
Speaker 1: fuck is like independently hopping in your private plane and
Speaker 1: fing to a country that your country is actively bombing
Speaker 1: to try to parachute down and negotiate for peace between
Speaker 1: your two nations without anyone asking. I would describe that
Speaker 1: as pretty bug fuck. Yeah, that's that's not This is
Speaker 1: like a new term for me, and now this is
Speaker 1: the only like reference point I have for it, So
Speaker 1: I'm not going to know how to how to define
Speaker 1: bug funk moving forward. Okay, So bug funk is when
Speaker 1: like the world is falling apart and you're like fuck
Speaker 1: it and you and you go the funk off and
Speaker 1: then you is that it kind of yeah, like it
Speaker 1: was a kind of thing where like there was no
Speaker 1: chance of it ever working. He did not have the
Speaker 1: authority to to to sign a peace treaty for Germany,
Speaker 1: uh and Britain did not have any interest in talking
Speaker 1: with him or making peace with Germany at this point. Um.
Speaker 1: So he basically just flew and crash landed in England
Speaker 1: and got arrested and spent the rest of his life
Speaker 1: in prison. And it was he huge embarrassment for Hitler
Speaker 1: because this this is like his right hand man who
Speaker 1: in the middle of the war like flies to his
Speaker 1: enemies country to like try to negotiate without Hitler's approval.
Speaker 1: It was it was very weird. Um And because hess
Speaker 1: was like this occult dude into astrology and all this
Speaker 1: ship and like this weird he was actually kind of
Speaker 1: like a Buddhist, Like he's a weird dude. Um, but
Speaker 1: because he held all these weird beliefs and he piste
Speaker 1: off Hitler so badly. Hitler bands like all of this
Speaker 1: weird occult ship that had cropped up around the Nazi
Speaker 1: Party in ninety one. So yeah, so after forty one,
Speaker 1: like really most of that stuff is illegal, Heinrich Hitler
Speaker 1: gets up to a little bit of it with the
Speaker 1: s S because he's got a castle and he he's
Speaker 1: just a weird dude. We'll get into some of that
Speaker 1: in a later episode. The important thing to understand is that, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: Hitler was like a distinctly not wooy guy, Like he's
Speaker 1: not a new age sort of dude. He's like if
Speaker 1: you mentioned You're like if he's like the guys on Reddit,
Speaker 1: who like if you mentioned you so much as nine
Speaker 1: your zodiac sign, They're like, she's not credible, she's fun,
Speaker 1: she's a she's lost. Yes, I love that type of person,
Speaker 1: and I I feel confident saying that. A hundred percent
Speaker 1: of Hitler's biographers agree he would have been extremely on Reddit.
Speaker 1: I owe more on Reddit than anyone has ever been
Speaker 1: on Red. Sure. Yeah, no, he would be the most
Speaker 1: reddity guy of of all of them. And we have
Speaker 1: to admit that that is very what's his signs? That's
Speaker 1: very his sign of him. Wouldn't you say, I don't know,
Speaker 1: he's such a Taurus, he's s Taurus. Sure, okay, continue,
Speaker 1: that's I assume you're referring to the maker of really
Speaker 1: shoddy handguns, which is I think they're Brazilian terrible guns. Okay. No,
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to the behind the bastard's board. Not
Speaker 1: either way of advocating the Taurust sign or the Taurist
Speaker 1: firearms brand is not going to go well for you.
Speaker 1: Um um. Yeah. So now Hitler, so he's not into
Speaker 1: the occult at all. He's not a big fan of
Speaker 1: Christianity either. Um. He felt it was fundamentally Jewish because
Speaker 1: Jesus was Jewish, which is, you know, not an irrational
Speaker 1: point of view within the logic of being a Nazi. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he worried a weakened the German people. But he
Speaker 1: also respected Christianity for its ability to inculcate good values
Speaker 1: in the German people. Uh. And the primary good value
Speaker 1: it inculcated was making lots of babies because most Germans
Speaker 1: were Catholic, and Catholics aren't big fans of condoms. I'm
Speaker 1: not not sure if you're aware of that. Um No,
Speaker 1: I know I wouldn't have aunts if it weren't for
Speaker 1: this attitude, none of us would. Now. Hitler himself was
Speaker 1: a baptized Roman Catholic all his life, he probably didn't
Speaker 1: really believe much of anything other than that that Hitler
Speaker 1: was a cool dude. Um, but he felt it was
Speaker 1: important to maintain this image. Um. Now. There were some
Speaker 1: among his followers that it was Nazism's destiny to become
Speaker 1: the new Great German religion, but Hitler himself pushed back
Speaker 1: against this, insisting in mind comp that national socialism quote
Speaker 1: is not a religious reform, but a political reorganization of
Speaker 1: the German people. He believed, quote, it is criminal to
Speaker 1: try to destroy the accepted faith of the people as
Speaker 1: long as there is nothing to replace it. And it
Speaker 1: is possible that given enough time, Hitler would have tried
Speaker 1: to replace Christianity with something else, but he never attempted
Speaker 1: to do so. And as far as we know, the
Speaker 1: supernatural as it's generally known, played very little role in
Speaker 1: the Nazi regime. But and here's where the real episode starts.
Speaker 1: In the decades since Hitler shot himself in that bunker
Speaker 1: in ve Nazism has changed quite a lot the actual
Speaker 1: political and historic beliefs of the original Nazis, and if
Speaker 1: Hitler himself have been twisted and shifted into something even weirder.
Speaker 1: It would be too much to say that this new
Speaker 1: form of Nazism is more dangerous than the original, given
Speaker 1: the tens of millions of people who died from the
Speaker 1: original Nazism, But it's probably accurate to say that the
Speaker 1: fact that Nazism has mutated into what we call esoteric
Speaker 1: hitlersm um has made it better able to survive in
Speaker 1: the era of the Internet. Now. Esoteric hitler Ism is
Speaker 1: a term used to refer to a number of different
Speaker 1: strains of postwar Nazi thought that put a bizarre religious
Speaker 1: and occult spin on Nazi racial theories and on Hitler himself,
Speaker 1: often seeing the man as essentially the avatar of a god.
Speaker 1: Uh four Chan and eight Chan are in the modern age,
Speaker 1: two of the most prolific vectors for this the spread
Speaker 1: of this brand of nonsense. There are strains of it
Speaker 1: in Brenton Terrence Manifesto and Honor's Brevick's Manifesto. And today
Speaker 1: we're talking about the woman who invented all of this,
Speaker 1: the single person who became the living link between the
Speaker 1: Nazism that tried and failed to conquer Europe and the
Speaker 1: modern Nazi movement that spawns mass shootings and attempted mass
Speaker 1: shootings on a monthly basis today. Her name was Savitri
Speaker 1: Devi and she was a huge piece of ship. This
Speaker 1: is someone's feminism somewhere. This is some piece of ships feminism.
Speaker 1: She is a feminist icon. Feminism is the law. Now.
Speaker 1: This is a woman who spent her whole life living
Speaker 1: alone with a pile of cats and changing Nazism forever. Okay,
Speaker 1: well what if she just did the first half? You know,
Speaker 1: that was not she was not willing to do just
Speaker 1: the first She's like, okay, so I'm in a pile
Speaker 1: of cats, that's great, what else could I do? And
Speaker 1: that was her second idea. That's embarrassed, that was her
Speaker 1: second idea. It does she does start first focused on
Speaker 1: the cats and then moved straight to Nazism though. It's remarkable. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So she was born Maximiani Portas on September nine five
Speaker 1: in Lyon, France. Her mother, Julia, came from Cornwall, the
Speaker 1: town with the thirty six dumbest name in all of England.
Speaker 1: Her father's ancestry was a milange of various Mediterranean peoples
Speaker 1: without access to birth control. He was mostly at Allian
Speaker 1: in Greek. Although young Maximiani was born a French citizen,
Speaker 1: she latched onto her father's Greek ancestry from the very beginning.
Speaker 1: Some of this had to do with the fact that
Speaker 1: Leon had a large and active Greek expat community, and
Speaker 1: her dad was a prominent member of it. She also
Speaker 1: nursed an early fascination with Roman history. Her name Maximiani
Speaker 1: was actually just the female form of Maximian, the proper
Speaker 1: first name of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. So she's up.
Speaker 1: She's a big old nerd. I really have to emphasize
Speaker 1: what a nerd she is. I feel like I've met
Speaker 1: versions of this girl in like sophomore English classes and
Speaker 1: they're like, actually something something, and you're like stop at
Speaker 1: stop that, please, just like finish reading. Their eyes were
Speaker 1: watching God, let's move on. I was the male version
Speaker 1: of this for a while. I mean I took three
Speaker 1: years of Latin because I was such a Roman history nerd. Okay, Robert.
Speaker 1: Some of us took five years of Latin, and do
Speaker 1: we remember a fucking thing? Of course? Not? No, no,
Speaker 1: I not not a goddamn word. I like when I
Speaker 1: was in high school, in junior high, in high school,
Speaker 1: if you were like in the quote unquote advanced classes,
Speaker 1: they would be like, let's teach them a language that
Speaker 1: they can't use. Goddamn totally useless term. Did you have
Speaker 1: to me? That's one of those. But did you have
Speaker 1: to use that textbook that was about the Romani family?
Speaker 1: Did you do a Romanti? Oh no, no man. I
Speaker 1: was like fucking Killius and Quintus. I remember those names.
Speaker 1: They were like the fucking It was like a bunch
Speaker 1: of Pompeii people who all died at the end of
Speaker 1: the book. Are everyone died at the end of our textbook? Wait?
Speaker 1: Was it like we had? We had the Cornelia family.
Speaker 1: It was like Cornelia and her brother Marcus, and then
Speaker 1: they had a friend named Sextus who they sound like
Speaker 1: fucking losers. They weren't. It was there. Your your family
Speaker 1: sounds way better because our family There was like three
Speaker 1: books in total, and the whole second book, So like
Speaker 1: all of eighth and ninth grade they're just stuck in
Speaker 1: a ditch. They're like in a it. Their carriage isn't
Speaker 1: a ditch. They can't get out. They're staying at an inn.
Speaker 1: The innkeepers yelling at them. They're stuck in a ditch.
Speaker 1: They're stuck in a did for a whole month. And
Speaker 1: then they go to Rome and and everything is fine.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a nightmare. Second, well, yeah, nightmare, so horrible.
Speaker 1: Maximiani would have gotten a lot. Well, no, she wouldn't have.
Speaker 1: She would have been the most annoying person in our
Speaker 1: Latin class. Yeah. I don't like when people are in
Speaker 1: the Latin class and they're also like into it, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, m, we should be learning. We didn't have
Speaker 1: to learn to pronounce anything right. You never had to
Speaker 1: speak because there was a crassical reason to speak it. Well,
Speaker 1: no one knows either, like you've got ecclesiastical Latin, but
Speaker 1: there's no way to know if it was exactly the
Speaker 1: same as with the Roman spoke. So we just didn't
Speaker 1: give a ship. It was great. Yeah, my teacher Ms.
Speaker 1: Cook would come and she would what was the thing?
Speaker 1: She would say. She was like, um, okay, discipuli at
Speaker 1: this descipula like She's like, hello, students, let's learn Julie
Speaker 1: is Caesar, and then we would just talk about how
Speaker 1: the family was stuck in the ditch all day. Well,
Speaker 1: Maximiani spent her young life stuck in that ditch, and
Speaker 1: that ditch was called being a huge nerd for Mediterranean
Speaker 1: classical civilizations. She was a strong willed child, which here
Speaker 1: is a synonym for unspeakably arrogant and a giant pain
Speaker 1: in the ass. She felt strongly about just about everything. Everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: strong willed. She was known to be utterly immovable once
Speaker 1: she latched onto an idea. One strong opinion she developed
Speaker 1: early was that British people were terrible, which is not inaccurate.
Speaker 1: She hated her mother's English friends and the way they
Speaker 1: prattled on about illnesses and their dying families. Harsh. That's
Speaker 1: so harsh, Like I wish my family wasn't. She's like,
Speaker 1: shut Jesus Christ, Yeah, we get it. She didn't like
Speaker 1: French people very much much either, and the particular cause
Speaker 1: for her hatred of the French was the French Revolution.
Speaker 1: She read about it as a little girl in school
Speaker 1: and was instantly furious. The Republican ideals of equality, liberty,
Speaker 1: and fraternity disgusted her. She was punished at school for
Speaker 1: making an obscene gesture at a plaque of the Declaration
Speaker 1: of the Rights of Man. And again, how she's like
Speaker 1: eight or nine. Yeah, she's like a fucking little kid
Speaker 1: at this point. Yeah. The Declaration of the Rights of Man,
Speaker 1: which small child Savitri Devi flipped off, includes such controversial
Speaker 1: takes as people are innocent until proven guilty, people have
Speaker 1: the right to liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression,
Speaker 1: and people should be able to speak and write with freedom.
Speaker 1: Some real hot She's okay, So she was like born
Speaker 1: to be harmful, she was born to be a fascist.
Speaker 1: Like she as a small child, She's like, people aren't equal?
Speaker 1: What is this bullshit? That's so the little flipping off
Speaker 1: to human rights? You do you do feel like we
Speaker 1: should have known? We should have known. I mean, I
Speaker 1: love flipping off old documents too, But to me, it's
Speaker 1: the magna carta, and the magna carta knows why. The
Speaker 1: magna carta knows what she did. Oh yeah, the Manacarta
Speaker 1: shakes in her boots whenever you come walk. The Magna
Speaker 1: Carta is a messy bitch, and I have no time
Speaker 1: for it. Okay, Robert, g I can't believe you just
Speaker 1: called a female document of bitch a messy. You're setting
Speaker 1: a bad example, Robert. Feminism is document misogyny. She's she's
Speaker 1: literally shaking right now. She's here. You didn't tell me
Speaker 1: the magna carta was in the room to She's literally
Speaker 1: she drove me here. Horrible. She's, well, I don't have
Speaker 1: driver's license. I don't know what you want. I don't
Speaker 1: know how much further to take this bit. So I'm
Speaker 1: just kinda Later in life, in nineteen Savitri Devi told
Speaker 1: an interviewer a beautiful girl is not equal to an
Speaker 1: ugly girl. So she remained pretty consistent about her belief
Speaker 1: in the fundamental inequality of human beings, like her whole life.
Speaker 1: And she's getting really granular about it too. Yeah, she's
Speaker 1: granular about sucking everything now. Chief motivating factor in her childhood,
Speaker 1: I have to say, was completely understandable. She felt a deep,
Speaker 1: powerful sense of rage at the abuse of animals by
Speaker 1: human beings, starting at age five. Yeah, starting at age five,
Speaker 1: she began expressing to her parents concern at the abuse
Speaker 1: of animals she witnessed in a daily basis. She was
Speaker 1: horrified by circuses, the fur trade, and the eating of meat.
Speaker 1: While still in elementary school, she became a committed vegetarian
Speaker 1: and eventually a vegan. Maximiani Portas was particularly disgusted by
Speaker 1: the abuse of cats by peasants on the French countryside.
Speaker 1: Her only real biographer, Nicolas Goodrick Clark, claims this quote
Speaker 1: disgusted her and turned her against manned kind. And since
Speaker 1: most people listening probably don't know anything about the history
Speaker 1: of cat torture in Europe, I didn't know anything about
Speaker 1: the history of cat torture in Europe. I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: to talk about that now for a little while. Like
Speaker 1: specific to this region, cat torture all of Europe, really,
Speaker 1: but like, yeah, specifically to France. Like the French hate cats, Okay, listen,
Speaker 1: they are assholes about cats. Yeah. Uh. Today we rightly
Speaker 1: revere cats as our moral and intellectual superiors, and we
Speaker 1: have organized or society around pleasing them. This is right
Speaker 1: and good. But cats have not always been beloved in
Speaker 1: the West. While they are considered basically wholly in Islam,
Speaker 1: they're like ritually clean, like you can have them in
Speaker 1: in mosques and stuff all over the place. You have
Speaker 1: to wash your hands after touching them if you're gonna
Speaker 1: go pray. There's a long Christian tradition of seeing cats
Speaker 1: as demonic entities. Uh. And to be fair, Islam is
Speaker 1: kind of shitty on the subject of dogs. So I
Speaker 1: guess whatever of the big religions you pick, you're gonna
Speaker 1: be terrible to one of the good animals. I don't
Speaker 1: know why. Yeah, it's weird. Now. In the fifteenth century, Edward,
Speaker 1: Duke of York, announced that if the devil inhabited any
Speaker 1: living animal, it was the cat, and for centuries all
Speaker 1: around Europe, good Christians tortured and murdered cats for almost
Speaker 1: no reason. In Belgium, they held an event called caton Stote,
Speaker 1: the Festival of Cats, which sounds awesome but actually just
Speaker 1: involved drunken townsfolk throwing cats from the top of the
Speaker 1: church onto hard cobble stones and then lighting them on fire. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I hey, okay. It's always really frustrating when you hear
Speaker 1: a story about the underclass and it's like you're playing
Speaker 1: to stereotypes about the underclass. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be honest. I bet the rich people got to
Speaker 1: go up first and throw the nicest cats just to set. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then and then they would privately be throwing cats
Speaker 1: at hard marble floors as well. My god, it's horrible.
Speaker 1: And Catton Stot still still takes place in Epra every May,
Speaker 1: but they use stuffed animals now, which just stop, just
Speaker 1: just stop. It's not a good tradition. It would be
Speaker 1: so easy to not do it. It would be so
Speaker 1: easy they do. Do they eat the cat? Like? Do
Speaker 1: they or is it just we're just killing the cats?
Speaker 1: Not that that makes no, they're just murdering cats for
Speaker 1: no good reason. Okay, it's fun, that is, and people
Speaker 1: are horrible, But Jamie, you know who doesn't randomly torture
Speaker 1: cats in Belgium? Your sponsors? That is exactly right. Sophie
Speaker 1: vets every sponsor to make sure they do not torture
Speaker 1: cats in Belgium. Yes, is that that's true? That's a lie, Robert, Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: it is a small country, so the vetting is pretty easy.
Speaker 1: Like you'll notice I did not say, for example, Canada. No,
Speaker 1: you certainly just got canceled before our very eyes products.
Speaker 1: We're back. Yeah, those were good ads, Jamie, good products,
Speaker 1: after all those good ads. Are you ready to hear
Speaker 1: more about the systematic torture of cats by generations of Europeans.
Speaker 1: I just got a cat, Robert, this is not fair.
Speaker 1: I love cats. Shoutout, Flee. Shout out to flee my cat.
Speaker 1: He's got a big Neck's got a big neck. Shout
Speaker 1: out to Roach, one of the side characters in the
Speaker 1: first version of the movie with Keanu Reeves, where some
Speaker 1: of the people are bank robbers but they also surfers.
Speaker 1: Oh oh, oh, you're talking about the Kiana Reeves surfing
Speaker 1: movie with um we've covered on. Yes, Roach. Roach is
Speaker 1: the one who bleeds out in a plane point break.
Speaker 1: He's a good character. We're talking about We're talking about
Speaker 1: point Break, Yes, point Break, that's the movie classic. Yes. Now,
Speaker 1: in France, there was a centuries old tradition of burning
Speaker 1: hundreds of cats to death and gigantic bonfires. Louis sixteenth
Speaker 1: even famously lit Paris's cat fire in Brutes such a
Speaker 1: cat fire. Yeah, of course, who else, Jamie, who else?
Speaker 1: This is just all news to me, Just just okay.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm glad that this wasn't like common knowledge. I
Speaker 1: would be horrified if I just didn't, you know, even
Speaker 1: burning cats Okay, Like it doesn't surprise obviously, like you
Speaker 1: have to assume earlier times people are more callous to
Speaker 1: cats and dogs because them being like what they are
Speaker 1: now is kind of a more recent development because we
Speaker 1: have all these extra resources. But I didn't realize it
Speaker 1: was this like cruel, This is a lot is in
Speaker 1: the cat fire. That's like bad writing. M m yeah,
Speaker 1: so the king would would. Yeah, so brule lichettes, which
Speaker 1: I am not going to pronounce more correctly than that
Speaker 1: because it's a horrible thing. And fuck funk. France, as
Speaker 1: it was called um varied in a number of different ways.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it was just massive bonfires where living cats were
Speaker 1: tied uh together in like huge pires. Sometimes living cats
Speaker 1: were tied above small fires on like a spit and
Speaker 1: then roasted to death. Sometimes cats were set in wooden
Speaker 1: cages and burnt to death. Uh. In some towns, people
Speaker 1: known as Coramant's cat chasers would soak cats and fuel
Speaker 1: light them on fire and chase them through town to
Speaker 1: the amusement of citizens. People are so upset all the time.
Speaker 1: I know, right, they're an oppressed species. Yes they are. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would be piste. We you should be. I'm pissed.
Speaker 1: The charred remains of these tortured cats were taken home
Speaker 1: as good luck charms by people. In seventeen thirty, as
Speaker 1: revolutionary sentiments simmered and bubbled throughout French society, to Parisian
Speaker 1: apprentice printers got fed up with their masters and abducted
Speaker 1: their cats. They staged a massive public trial, the Great
Speaker 1: Cat Massacre, as it's become known to history. Now, this
Speaker 1: was tied more towards issues of class hatred than hatred
Speaker 1: of cats. Um. But the cats wound up actually like,
Speaker 1: but they end up being the escaped cats for the
Speaker 1: whole situation exactly. And that's also the worst way to
Speaker 1: die as as a symbol for something that has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with you. Yeah, those cats have no understanding
Speaker 1: of class theory. It's like if someone like murder me
Speaker 1: and then they're like, well, this has something to do
Speaker 1: with Like my opinion on the new Taylor Swift record
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with Jamie, but I killed her
Speaker 1: as to send a message. It would be like if
Speaker 1: one group of aliens came to Earth and murdered you
Speaker 1: for something they knew human beings were going to do
Speaker 1: a hundred years in the future. Something you're completely incapable
Speaker 1: of understanding or knowing about, Like just yeah, this like
Speaker 1: it's just wild. But these apprentices felt their masters treated
Speaker 1: the family cats better than their workers. Um. And because
Speaker 1: they couldn't quite you know, murder their bosses. Uh, they
Speaker 1: got a crowd together and they captured a bunch of
Speaker 1: rich people's cats, and then they put them on trial
Speaker 1: and sentenced them to be hung until dead. And they
Speaker 1: hung just a funkload of cats to death. They made
Speaker 1: like the owners of the cats watch. It was super
Speaker 1: fucked up. I don't know what to do right now. Well,
Speaker 1: what you can do right now is you can get
Speaker 1: a little bit into the head of a sensitive young
Speaker 1: soul like Maximiani Portas, because a lot of this stuff
Speaker 1: was still going on in France. It wasn't at its worse,
Speaker 1: but like cat torture and burning was still happening in
Speaker 1: the countryside. And she sees this as a little girl
Speaker 1: and is like, this is part of why she hates
Speaker 1: those like you know, French revolutionary all use of freedom
Speaker 1: and equality is She's like, well, clearly this is all bullshit.
Speaker 1: Look at what they're doing to these animals, Like where's
Speaker 1: their you know, equality and freedom and like like like
Speaker 1: she that's kind of like where she comes at this from, right. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so she's deeply sympathetic to animals and particularly cats, and
Speaker 1: basically incapable of being sympathetic to human beings. Um and yeah,
Speaker 1: so an interesting story. I'm going to be interested in
Speaker 1: how she galaxy brains being sympathetic towards the plight of
Speaker 1: of of brutally murdered cats to becoming a fascist. But
Speaker 1: you know, I fascism common thing for fascists, to be honest,
Speaker 1: it's to fascism, well, you know, not committing cat murders,
Speaker 1: but like hating people because of how garbage they are
Speaker 1: and thinking fascism is the only way to fix something
Speaker 1: because people just can't be allowed to live on their own. Okay,
Speaker 1: I knew that. I think I thought you were saying
Speaker 1: cats specific reasons. I'm like, well, this is a true education. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: Maximiani was very good in school. She was a bright student.
Speaker 1: She read and wrote constantly, and her very favorite writer
Speaker 1: was a nineteenth century French poet, Charles Leconte Delisle. Uh.
Speaker 1: And here's how Savitri's biographer describes Leconte Delisle's work in
Speaker 1: the book Hitler's Priestess, which is really the only decent
Speaker 1: biography of Savitri Devi quote Leconte Delisle's own tragic view
Speaker 1: of the universe. His romantic colors were always tinged with
Speaker 1: somber pessimism, strongly appealed to Maximiani. He regarded all religious
Speaker 1: symbols as fragments of a divine truth, but the profusion
Speaker 1: of faiths over time convinced him of the relative value
Speaker 1: and ultimate vanity of every doctrine. Beset by a sense
Speaker 1: of cosmic futility, Leconte Delisle rejected Christianity and evoked the
Speaker 1: stoical heroism of barbarian and exotic people's and his famous
Speaker 1: poem Psycho Poems Barbara's. He was also powerfully attracted to
Speaker 1: Hinduism following the translation of its sacred texts in the
Speaker 1: eighteen forties. Maximiani felt a profound sympathy with Le Conte
Speaker 1: Delisle's view of life's fragility, the vanity of existence, and
Speaker 1: the illusion of the world. His romantic poems about the
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptians, the Scandinavians, the Celts and Hindus their proud
Speaker 1: paganism and heroic action, yet final resignation in the face
Speaker 1: of death and oblivion confirmed her own of version to
Speaker 1: Christianity and helped her form her own fatalistic worldview. So
Speaker 1: goths didn't exist in the early twentieth century, but Maximi
Speaker 1: is clearly that she is a proto goth It's again,
Speaker 1: it's just like, if there had been a hot topic
Speaker 1: for her to uh, you know, be, a lot could
Speaker 1: have been avoided. Imagine how many hot topic employees were
Speaker 1: saved by that business, Yeah, a lot of them. Imagine
Speaker 1: how many fascists we avoided by, for example, the existence
Speaker 1: of Kylo Wrin fan fiction. Honestly, honestly, it's wow. That
Speaker 1: actually hit for me. Wow, that hit that people. People
Speaker 1: need an outlet, you know, and if you don't, this
Speaker 1: is what happens. Right, You're just like, if you can
Speaker 1: make it horny and palatable, you're going to prevent something bad.
Speaker 1: This was a a young girl who desperately needed to
Speaker 1: be distracted, and nothing distracted her, and that it's a
Speaker 1: problem had blaze at a pretty clear track for you
Speaker 1: to really, I mean, I just yeah, send me back
Speaker 1: in time with a Jack Skellington hoodie for this woman.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that would have solved so many problems,
Speaker 1: created some others. I mean, she still would have been
Speaker 1: a deeply annoying person, but like I had a Jack
Speaker 1: Skellington hoodie. But also I had never seen the movie.
Speaker 1: I was a total poser. Oh boy, that's going to
Speaker 1: get you canceled harder than anything else today. And then
Speaker 1: I saw the movie and guess what, I didn't like
Speaker 1: it very much. I watched it. It's fine, it's fine. Well,
Speaker 1: actually I don't. I think it's maybe not so good.
Speaker 1: Beautiful animation though, anyways, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you get
Speaker 1: a judge it for its time, ah do I? Anyways,
Speaker 1: it was no For example, the Little Toaster, I don't know, yeah, no, no,
Speaker 1: it didn't kids up. I loved the Little Toaster. Damaged
Speaker 1: me forever, really, that's why. But he was brave robber.
Speaker 1: That's why you throw bagels, right, Robert, I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's why I'm scared of fucking radiators. You've got to
Speaker 1: do some exposure therapy for you. With brave old toaster.
Speaker 1: That's why he doesn't toast his bagels. He only. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's like the thing tragic. M's tragic. Imagine the path
Speaker 1: we could have avoided. I know Maximiani Portis was very
Speaker 1: political as a young girl. Um when World War One
Speaker 1: started in nineteen fourteen, she at nine years old, knew
Speaker 1: very clearly that she did not trust the entent powers
Speaker 1: UM so like England, France, you know, Russia. Some of
Speaker 1: this likely came from the fact that Greece's King Constantine
Speaker 1: was very pro German and refused to get into the
Speaker 1: war on the side of either the entent or the
Speaker 1: central Powers UM. But the King of Greece's prime minister,
Speaker 1: a guy named Venizelos UM which I'm probably mispronouncing, uh,
Speaker 1: disagreed with the king. He was very pro British and
Speaker 1: supported Greece getting into the war. The two fought over
Speaker 1: this for years until in nineteen sixteen a group of
Speaker 1: pro Venizelos army officers staged a coup against the king.
Speaker 1: There were rumors that the untuanted back this, and those
Speaker 1: rumors seemed credible in light of the fact that French
Speaker 1: and British troops landed in Salonika and Athens in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifteen and sixteen to force Greek compliance in their demands
Speaker 1: from military access to the Macedonian Front so they could
Speaker 1: better fight Austria Hungary. Um, that's a lot a history there,
Speaker 1: but basically she's very pro Greece and wants Greased to
Speaker 1: stay out of the war because she also likes Germany,
Speaker 1: hates the English, hates the French, and she's piste off
Speaker 1: because England and France back this prime minister who wants
Speaker 1: Greased to get into the war and they also funk
Speaker 1: with Greek sovereignty and stuff. She gets really angry overall.
Speaker 1: And and how old is she at this point? Like
Speaker 1: where where are we? Nine? Ten eleven years old? When
Speaker 1: I imagine, did you know what was going on in
Speaker 1: the world when you were nine or ten years old? Like?
Speaker 1: How where were you? I was pretty I mean not
Speaker 1: nine and eleven. Happened when I was like twelve, And
Speaker 1: that was definitely like the start of me getting political.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, I was. I was in World War One. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. World War One's that level of thing, right
Speaker 1: where like even a little kid is gonna like, you're
Speaker 1: gonna pay attention to that ship. It's kind of a
Speaker 1: big deal. You won't have a fully formed opinion, but
Speaker 1: you'll you'll know what's going on. You'll know what's going
Speaker 1: I guess I'm just like, it would be so bizarre
Speaker 1: to me if someone was like Jamie's beliefs at eight
Speaker 1: years old, was nine eleven? Was school got out early
Speaker 1: that day? And and this is where I should note
Speaker 1: that this is going to be an imperfect episode in
Speaker 1: terms of that sort of thing, because our main source
Speaker 1: on this is Hitler's Priestess, which is a biography that's
Speaker 1: fairly decent but also flawed because it's mainly based on
Speaker 1: Savitri Devi's own biographical writings of her recollections of her
Speaker 1: own life. Like, there's just not a lot of information.
Speaker 1: There's not a lot of weren't a lot of people
Speaker 1: to go back to and like talk to about her
Speaker 1: and as a child and stuff who were still alive
Speaker 1: when she became relevant. I think it was written if
Speaker 1: I could write about like what I thought I thought
Speaker 1: at eight years old, I'd be like, Jamie was a
Speaker 1: brilliant genius who had start opinions on foreign policy. Okay,
Speaker 1: got it well. But that said, given the I don't
Speaker 1: think we shouldn't discard all of this because if you
Speaker 1: look at the thrust of her life, she does live
Speaker 1: the life of someone who's always been very political I
Speaker 1: mean yeah exactly so, um yeah. Venizelos and his men
Speaker 1: took over part of Greece with the backing of Britain
Speaker 1: and France UH, and those two countries were happy to
Speaker 1: recognize his government while they carried out a brutal ten
Speaker 1: month blockade of the Greek provinces that stayed loyal to
Speaker 1: the king. And young Maximiani watched all this as she
Speaker 1: grew into an adolescent girl. Some of her earliest memories
Speaker 1: were news reports of protests from Athens of royalist crowds
Speaker 1: railing against the entent and Maximiani sided with them and
Speaker 1: consider of the Antons treatment of Greece to be basically criminal.
Speaker 1: Her disgust was reinforced after the war. In the wake
Speaker 1: of the Central powers defeat, the Ottoman Empire was broken
Speaker 1: up and Greece was given control in the Versailles Treaty
Speaker 1: of A city called Smyrna now Smyrna is a city
Speaker 1: on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, which is modern day Turkey.
Speaker 1: It was the center of a nearly three thousand year
Speaker 1: old Greek community that lived on the coast of Anatolia.
Speaker 1: Greece with some justification thought that a lot of Anatolia
Speaker 1: ought to be part of Greece because it was culturally
Speaker 1: and historically Greece, and the newly created nation of Turkey
Speaker 1: did not agree. So, with the backing of the Versailles Treaty,
Speaker 1: Greece invaded Smyrna in nineteen nineteen to make good on
Speaker 1: the promises that you know, had been made to them
Speaker 1: by the entant, and the fighting was a disaster from
Speaker 1: the beginning. The Ottoman Empire had been defeated in the
Speaker 1: war technically, but on the ground and actual battles their
Speaker 1: soldiers had performed pretty well. They'd fought off a big
Speaker 1: invasion at Gallipoli. The birth of the Turkish nation after
Speaker 1: the fall of the Ottoman Empire was met with a
Speaker 1: swelling of nationalist fervor in Anatolia, and this helped to
Speaker 1: spawn a powerful insurgent Turkish movement dedicated to defeating the
Speaker 1: Greek invasion m hm. SO. A truce was reached in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty, but like many recent truces in Turkish military history,
Speaker 1: it was not a real truce, and around the same
Speaker 1: time King Constantine was restored to the Greek throne. This turn,
Speaker 1: the remaining Great powers of Europe against Greece, and even
Speaker 1: though they promised Greece Smyrna and the Versailles Treaty in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty one, they basically like like, funk that ship
Speaker 1: and hold all of their support. Do we know where
Speaker 1: the where the Greeks at this time stood on cats? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know, they're closer to the Middle East. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna guess more pro cat, more pro cat. Okay, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think yeah. The further in that direction you get
Speaker 1: more pro cat, less pro dog. You know, I think
Speaker 1: that's generally fair Western They've got a lot of dogs. Yeah, yeah, dog.
Speaker 1: Maybe they just lit cats and dogs on fire. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I did not do that research. Okay, these
Speaker 1: are the questions I have Robert take of relieve them.
Speaker 1: So the French and Italian governments like betray Greece first,
Speaker 1: and they signed agreements with the Turkish leader Mustapha Kamal
Speaker 1: and to ignore the promises they had made in the
Speaker 1: Verse I Treaty to Greece. Britain held out the longest,
Speaker 1: but when Greece launched an offensive in Anatolia in March
Speaker 1: of nine, all of the allies suddenly adopted a policy
Speaker 1: of neutrality. Britain banned for their arms sales to Grease Well,
Speaker 1: France was happy to allow its weapons makers to sell
Speaker 1: straight to Turkey. The whole effort to incorporate the Greek
Speaker 1: regions of Anatolia into the Greek nation ended in disaster
Speaker 1: and military defeat. In nineteen twenty two, Greek forces fled
Speaker 1: Asia Minor, and the Turkish army conducted a campaign of
Speaker 1: extermination and ethnic cleansing on their agan coast. They massacred
Speaker 1: some thirty thousand Christians, a mix of Greeks, Armenians and Frank's,
Speaker 1: in order to ensure no Greek independence movement would ever
Speaker 1: crop up on their coast again. This Mrner debacle. This,
Speaker 1: this is why there's no real Greek community in Anatoly anymore,
Speaker 1: not like there was for three thousand years prior. This
Speaker 1: is like what she wipes out that community. Uh So,
Speaker 1: you can see why a Greek nationalist like Maximiani Portas,
Speaker 1: who is like fifteen sixteen years old then and like
Speaker 1: really actually starting to like understand the world, is furious
Speaker 1: about all this, and it it breeds in her a
Speaker 1: powerful hatred of the entent powers, particularly of France and
Speaker 1: of of England. Um. And she basically felt that like
Speaker 1: all these fancy words they had about liberty and democracy
Speaker 1: were bullshit when they couldn't even hold the basic promises
Speaker 1: and protect the lives of tens of thousands of innocent
Speaker 1: Greek civilians, which is very valid. Yes, yeah, yeah, Now
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to like ignore the Turkish point of
Speaker 1: view in this too, like Greece is not in the
Speaker 1: right here as a country either, Like everybody's in the wrong,
Speaker 1: although Turkey massacrest people, so I'm gonna say, maybe they're
Speaker 1: more in the wrong. But this is complicated. But this
Speaker 1: is sort of how Maximiani is very much on the
Speaker 1: side of Greece is fucked over. And this is an
Speaker 1: entirely like a crime committed by the Entente powers against
Speaker 1: against Greece, and it sets up the rest of her
Speaker 1: life in a lot of ways. Um. So other influences
Speaker 1: on her developing mind, where the sight of French crowds
Speaker 1: and leon cheering uproariously at the brutal terms of the
Speaker 1: Treaty of Versailles when they were announced. She was horrified
Speaker 1: when the French government stationed black Synegalese troops to occupy
Speaker 1: the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland. Now, this is one of
Speaker 1: those moves by France that engendered a whole shit litter
Speaker 1: racism in Central Europe. It was a big influence on
Speaker 1: a lot of early Nazi thinkers too. And obviously black
Speaker 1: soldiers aren't he worse than white ones, but as civilians
Speaker 1: living under military occupation, you're going to hate whatever foreign
Speaker 1: soldiers occupy your country. And if those soldiers are the
Speaker 1: only black people who've ever met, it wasn't a great
Speaker 1: move on France's behalf Jesus Christ. Yeah, so I'm trying
Speaker 1: to set up all of like this is like the
Speaker 1: ship that is forming. She's twelve, fifteen, sixteen is all
Speaker 1: this is going on like formative fucking years. Yea. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So she hates France, she hates England, she hates black people,
Speaker 1: she hates Turkish people, She's she loves a lot more hate.
Speaker 1: She loves cats. This is the consistent one. Yeah. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty three, a fresherly graduated Maximiani Portis left
Speaker 1: France to attend college in Greece. She was just on
Speaker 1: the edge of eighteen and furious with the status quo
Speaker 1: in Europe. Without any real clear idea of how she
Speaker 1: thought things ought to be. Instead, she did, however, know
Speaker 1: that she was obsessed with Hellenism, which is like ancient
Speaker 1: Greek culture. She's a she's dork. Yeah, she's a big
Speaker 1: fucking joy. She's like Troy, Oh my god. She would
Speaker 1: not shut up about the Elliot. She was a fucking you.
Speaker 1: I find multiple translations and you're like, can you not?
Speaker 1: She has wrong and profoundly thirsty opinions on Achilles. She's
Speaker 1: like ranked gods and goddesses hot. If she'd seen the
Speaker 1: actual movie Troy that came out like a decade ago,
Speaker 1: she would have been furious, because there's no way Brad
Speaker 1: Pitt was as hot as the Achilles in her mind. Beautiful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she believed the old Greeks had been quote a civilization
Speaker 1: of iron, rooted in truth, a civilization with all the
Speaker 1: virtues of the ancient world, none of its weaknesses, and
Speaker 1: all the technical achievements of the modern age, without modern hypocrisy,
Speaker 1: pettiness and moral squalor. Now this is of course wildly inaccurate. Uh.
Speaker 1: The ancient Greeks were like unbelievably fucked up. They also
Speaker 1: did a lot of cool shit obviously, like every other
Speaker 1: ancient that's all ancient people do, a lot of cool shit.
Speaker 1: All Aztecs amazing shit, horribly fucked up, ancient Romans, amazing ship,
Speaker 1: Han Chinese ancient amazing ship. Horribly for everybody. Yeah. In
Speaker 1: the Greek specific case, uh, they fucked a bunch of
Speaker 1: little kids. They repeatedly put narcissistic idiots in charge of
Speaker 1: their city states. They made numerous blunders that ensured their
Speaker 1: period of military and economic might was short lived. And
Speaker 1: they also created some of the most influential philosophy and
Speaker 1: fiction and art that has ever been made in the
Speaker 1: history of the human race. Complicated people, Um, Maximiani does
Speaker 1: not get a complex picture of ancient Greece. It's just
Speaker 1: the good ship. Yeah. Yeah, Um, you might say, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, like I want to say, her understanding
Speaker 1: of Greek history was not deep. It was certainly incomplete.
Speaker 1: Um that said pretty much only like, the only thing
Speaker 1: Europeans would write about the ancient Greeks in that period
Speaker 1: was wildly positive. You weren't going to get like critical
Speaker 1: like commentary on, for example, pederasty in ancient Greece in
Speaker 1: fucking nineteen twenty like it's you're just not going to
Speaker 1: read that. Um. Yeah. So her love of Greece was
Speaker 1: mostly focused on obsessing over their incredible art and fantasizing
Speaker 1: about the idealized culture that she to existed there, right,
Speaker 1: I mean this, I mean we as children all read
Speaker 1: revisionist history about horrifying cultures. I was obsessed with ancient
Speaker 1: Rome a lot of the same reasons, of course, because
Speaker 1: you're just like, oh, it seems like the only dio
Speaker 1: dope stuff and more cool outfits. Well, I will say
Speaker 1: I was kind of a fucked up kid, so when
Speaker 1: I learned about like all of the fucking crucifixions and
Speaker 1: ship I was kind of like, hell yeah, but you're
Speaker 1: so metal. I mean, it is pretty fucking metal metal.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about what they did to Spartacus and his
Speaker 1: friends one of these days, but it's fucking one of
Speaker 1: like the biggest mic drop moments in the history of
Speaker 1: torturing people to death with wood. Um. I think that's
Speaker 1: fair to say. Thrilled to have such a hyper specific um.
Speaker 1: So she moves to Greece. She's super happy for a while. Obviously,
Speaker 1: best place in the world for this girl is fucking Grace.
Speaker 1: At this point in time Um and the time she
Speaker 1: spent discovering the wonders of Athens rules Um coincided with
Speaker 1: some very important goings on in Germany. I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: again from the book Hitler's Priestess. Years later, she would
Speaker 1: recall that she spent such a sunlit afternoon upon the
Speaker 1: Acropolis on ninth October ninety three, the fateful day of
Speaker 1: Hitler's push, when he and his followers had attempted a
Speaker 1: coup against the Varian government and staged a march to
Speaker 1: the felde Heron Hall in the center of Munich. The
Speaker 1: police successfully broke up the march, and sixteen martyrs of
Speaker 1: the early Nazi movement fell beneath the hail of bullets.
Speaker 1: When details of the incident were published in the world
Speaker 1: press the following day, there was some discussion over lunch
Speaker 1: at the International Home Hostel, which is where she was
Speaker 1: crashing at the time. Maximiani admits that she did not
Speaker 1: yet connect Hitler with her own dream of a new
Speaker 1: racial order based on her view of classical Greek antiquity. However,
Speaker 1: she strongly sympathized with him as an enemy of the
Speaker 1: Allies on account of his contempt for the Versailles Treaty
Speaker 1: and saw a parallel between his nationalist idea of one
Speaker 1: state for all Germans and the Magali idea among the Greeks,
Speaker 1: which is the idea that like Greece should recoup its
Speaker 1: ancient like power and like Taco for the places that
Speaker 1: had controlled back in the day. She's a little ideal argument. Yeah.
Speaker 1: She engaged in a heated argument in defensive Hitler with
Speaker 1: the French managerist of the hostel. So so we've lost
Speaker 1: arguing about Hitler's with the hostel. No, we lost her
Speaker 1: when she's been gone for a while. Yeah, but you
Speaker 1: know who won't argue in support of Hitler with a
Speaker 1: French hostel owner in Athens. Robert the products and services
Speaker 1: support this podcast would never ever heard us or do
Speaker 1: something wrong. I've been saying it for years. I have
Speaker 1: all agreed for years. Fingers crossed for a dig pill
Speaker 1: ad right after this. But a great transition, both of you.
Speaker 1: Just wonderful work. We're back. So it was during this
Speaker 1: first visit to Greece that Maximiani Portis would have seen
Speaker 1: the symbol for the first time that would come to
Speaker 1: define her life and legacy. I am talking, of course,
Speaker 1: about the swastika. Odds are good she would have encountered
Speaker 1: it for the first time in the National Museum of Athens,
Speaker 1: which hosted a huge amount of what were believed to
Speaker 1: be Trojan artifacts, which had been uncovered by the pioneering
Speaker 1: and controversial archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Now Schleiman was not a
Speaker 1: professional archaeologist, which is not weird for the time. Most
Speaker 1: of like the archaeologies of this period, or like gentlemen
Speaker 1: adventurers who I mean get our nerds. Basically the people
Speaker 1: in the people in like the Mummy movies, who are
Speaker 1: just wearing people in Tarzan. That was the most accurate
Speaker 1: thing about the Mummy movie, other than the way mummies
Speaker 1: react to shotguns. They're all they're all named Clayton. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: so Schlimann uh yeah. Throughout the mid eighteen hundreds had
Speaker 1: been a very successful German arms merchant, trading raw materials
Speaker 1: for the ingredients to make ammunition um and he had
Speaker 1: nursed a deep obsession with the Iliot his entire life.
Speaker 1: In his late middle age, he decided to take his
Speaker 1: fortune to the Aegean and try to uncover the true
Speaker 1: loka of the ancient city of Troy. Unlike pretty much
Speaker 1: any like traditional archaeologists, Schlimann used the Iliad as a guide.
Speaker 1: He thought this book was like basically essentially accurate um
Speaker 1: and he followed the poem as if it had been
Speaker 1: a work of serious historical scholarship, and shockingly enough, this
Speaker 1: kind of worked. In eighteen seventy one, after three years
Speaker 1: of searching, Schleiman found what was very likely to have
Speaker 1: been the site of ancient Troy. His methods of digging
Speaker 1: it up were brutal. He used crowbars and battering rams
Speaker 1: and destroyed countless thousands of artifacts, including ironically, what a
Speaker 1: lot of archaeologists now believe was the actual physical evidence
Speaker 1: of Troy. He dug too far down basically because he was.
Speaker 1: He fucked up and probably destroyed what actual Trojan relics
Speaker 1: there were. But he doesn't find what a lot of
Speaker 1: people think was the site of Troy. It's just other
Speaker 1: ship was built there and he dug up the wrong
Speaker 1: ship anyway. It's fucked up, Yes, yes, So his research
Speaker 1: or his digging, despite all the ship destroyed, produced hundreds
Speaker 1: upon hundreds upon hundred of artifacts which people at the
Speaker 1: time believed to be Trojan and many of those artifacts,
Speaker 1: more than eighteen hundred of them were in blasmed with
Speaker 1: various types of swastika. And I'm gonna quote next from
Speaker 1: Scientific American. He would go on to see the swastika
Speaker 1: everywhere from Tibet to Paraguay to the Gold Coast of Africa.
Speaker 1: And as Schliemann's exploits grew more famous and archaeological discoveries
Speaker 1: became a way of creating a narrative of national identity,
Speaker 1: the swastika grew more prominent. It exploded in popularity as
Speaker 1: a symbol of good fortune, appearing on Coca Cola products,
Speaker 1: boy Scouts and girls club materials, and even American military uniforms.
Speaker 1: The Antiquities on Earth by Dr Schlieman at Troy acquire
Speaker 1: for us a double interest, wrote British linguist Archibald says
Speaker 1: in eighteen ninety six. They carry us back to the
Speaker 1: later stone ages of the Aryan race. Oh dear on
Speaker 1: Coca Cola products. Probably if that was just a product
Speaker 1: or service advertised, But it wasn't a nutz. It's like
Speaker 1: I spent some time living in in and it's the
Speaker 1: swasticas all over the dam and it is weird. It takes.
Speaker 1: You never really get used to it because of like
Speaker 1: what it means to the West. It's always like there's
Speaker 1: so many swast because around here, that is I mean,
Speaker 1: and that is fascinating to like track the history of
Speaker 1: a symbol and like how it affects different areas of
Speaker 1: the world differently. That sounds extremely darring. I actually I
Speaker 1: have some like tapestries that I picked up in India
Speaker 1: that have little swastikas on them in parts, and it's
Speaker 1: one of those things where it's like every now and then,
Speaker 1: like they're not the same as the Nazi swasticas, but
Speaker 1: they're close enough that people will be like, what, No,
Speaker 1: I need to leave your home right now? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean yeah, Like most people are pretty small, so most
Speaker 1: people aren't getting na Nazi swastie. If I was over
Speaker 1: your house and you said that, I would be like,
Speaker 1: I actually, my uber is here, you know, like if
Speaker 1: you're like, they're not nasty swas Nazi swasticas, so calm down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like that. And they offered me a Miller Lite.
Speaker 1: They're not not would you like a Miller Light? No? Exactly.
Speaker 1: My standard greeting people, Yeah, that's how you greet all
Speaker 1: your guests. That's specifically how I say to hello to
Speaker 1: the officers who pulled me over for speeding. No, I
Speaker 1: would be and he said that, I I know, I've
Speaker 1: gone down that Wikipedia hole at one point of just
Speaker 1: like tracking the symbology the symbology of the There's criticism
Speaker 1: of Schleiman honestly for his methods, but he's not in
Speaker 1: any way a Nazi, Like he's just a guy who
Speaker 1: finds a bunch of swastika is buried underground, and he's
Speaker 1: just an unqualified archaeologist using his money in a weird way.
Speaker 1: He's he's very controversial. Still, there are aspects of what
Speaker 1: he did that a lot of people praise because he
Speaker 1: got a lot of ship right, but he also destroyed
Speaker 1: a huge amount of cultural antiquities. He's an interesting person.
Speaker 1: You should read about Schleiman if you're stidn archaeology. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it seems like a lot of those gentlemen
Speaker 1: explorers really delighted and you know, like destroying and selling
Speaker 1: off pieces of ancient history that had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with them. All of them are problematic. Yeah, I will
Speaker 1: say Schliemann is one who comes from like a pure
Speaker 1: place of just being really into this history. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: you know they're all problematic, so hashtag yeah. Now the Swasti,
Speaker 1: because he found increasingly all over the world, played directly
Speaker 1: into a shared delusion that was spreading like a disease
Speaker 1: among many of the era's white people, the myth of
Speaker 1: the ancient arian. Now in actual historical terms, arian is
Speaker 1: a term used to refer to the Indo Aryan language group.
Speaker 1: It was never a racial classification. The terms started being
Speaker 1: used because early linguists noticed strange similarities between languages like German, Romani, Punjabi, Hindu,
Speaker 1: Urdu in Sanskrit. Well, the term Arian was initially applied
Speaker 1: to speakers of various Indo Iranian languages. The understanding of
Speaker 1: the word became corrupted in the late eighteen hundreds. This
Speaker 1: occurred along the same time that colonialism started to reach
Speaker 1: its absolute zenith, and there were a lot of white
Speaker 1: folks looking for reasons to justify the fact that they
Speaker 1: were basically plundering and enslaving the entire world. There were
Speaker 1: also a lot of white folks looking at their increasingly
Speaker 1: multiracial societies, which at that point, like ment Italians and Slavs,
Speaker 1: breed with Germans and British people. And we're getting concerned
Speaker 1: about this fact. Uh. And I'm gonna refer back to
Speaker 1: Smithsonian Magazine again quote. The rising interest in eugenics and
Speaker 1: rachel hygiene, however, led to some to corrupt Aryan into
Speaker 1: a descriptor for an ancient master racial identity with a
Speaker 1: clear through line to contemporary Germany. As The Washington Post
Speaker 1: reported in a story about the rise of Nazism several
Speaker 1: years before the start of World War Two, Arianism was
Speaker 1: an intellectual dispute between bewhiskered scholars as to the existence
Speaker 1: of a pure and undefiled Aryan race at once stage
Speaker 1: of Earth's history. In the nineteenth century, French aristocrat Arthur
Speaker 1: de Gobnel and others made the connection between the mythical
Speaker 1: Arians and the Germans, who are the superior descendants of
Speaker 1: the early people, now destined to lead the world to
Speaker 1: greater advancement by conquering their neighbors. The findings of Schlieman's
Speaker 1: digg in Turkey then suddenly had a deeper ideological meaning
Speaker 1: for the nationalists. The purely Arian symbol Schliemann uncovered was
Speaker 1: no longer an archaeological mystery. It was a stand in
Speaker 1: for their superiority. German nationalist groups like the reich Schamerbund,
Speaker 1: a nineteen twelve anti Semitic group and the Bavarian Frey
Speaker 1: Corp paramilitary. Basically, the proud boys of the era UM
Speaker 1: used the swastika to reflect their newly discovered identity as
Speaker 1: the master race. Now, the reality is that swastikas appeared
Speaker 1: damn near everywhere in human history. It's a common design
Speaker 1: and a striking one, and a bunch of different groups
Speaker 1: of people have independently figured it out over time. And
Speaker 1: people should stop talking to you about your blanket and
Speaker 1: actually just relaxed. They're pretty small. If you're nowadays, the
Speaker 1: swastika is the swastika, like it's the Nazi thing unless
Speaker 1: you're in India. Um, because the world's big. Um. But
Speaker 1: back in these days, like if you're looking at like
Speaker 1: ancient history, it's best to kind of look at the
Speaker 1: swastica like humor that weird s doodle we all put
Speaker 1: on our trapper keepers back in the nineties. Like no
Speaker 1: one invented that. It just showed up everywhere. That's the
Speaker 1: fucking swastika in prehistory. Um, It's just all over the
Speaker 1: damn place. But of course, yeah, oh I have that blanket. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was not seen as this though, um by a
Speaker 1: lot of people, and anthropologist Gwendoline Lake notes quote when
Speaker 1: Heinrich Schleeman discovered swastica like decorations on pottery, flagments and
Speaker 1: all archaeological levels at Troy, it was seen as evidence
Speaker 1: for a racial continuity and proof that the inhabitants of
Speaker 1: the site had been Arian all along. The link between
Speaker 1: the swastika and Indo European origin, once forged, was impossible
Speaker 1: to discard. It allowed the projection of nationalist feelings and
Speaker 1: associations onto a universal symbol, which hints served as a
Speaker 1: distinguishing boundary mark up between non Arian, or rather non
Speaker 1: German and German identity. That's fascinating that, I mean, because
Speaker 1: you can understand the logic, but it also is kind
Speaker 1: of absurd to assume that like, oh, this symbol is
Speaker 1: always surely must mean the exact same thing thousands of
Speaker 1: years ago as it does to me today. Now. The
Speaker 1: people then were as dumb as the people who planted
Speaker 1: the Iowa Caucuses. Wow, that's why all this happened. Robert,
Speaker 1: my my dog worked on the shadow app so really
Speaker 1: watch your mouth. That is son he invested in the
Speaker 1: shadow app I have to say it this all up? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, of course he kept he was talking about
Speaker 1: shadow app for and I'm like, that can't be real.
Speaker 1: And then I thought it was the Dog from what
Speaker 1: was that movie with the dogs and cats that talk
Speaker 1: and they find their family terrible. I don't know a
Speaker 1: good movie Homeward Bound Homeward. Oh, I haven't seen Homeward
Speaker 1: it found. Sonny definitely just wanted to harm people, and
Speaker 1: he wanted to harm the discourse, and that's why he
Speaker 1: invested in Shadow Up. That's fair. That's fair. You could
Speaker 1: call him the Hitler of the Iowa CAUCUSUS, which many has,
Speaker 1: but it makes me uncomfortable. Sitting in Athens, reading the
Speaker 1: news of Hitler's movement in Germany and staring at ancient
Speaker 1: swastika's on beloved Greek artifacts, things started to come together
Speaker 1: in Maximiani Portis's mind. She moved to Greece permanently in
Speaker 1: ninety after finishing college and renouncing her French citizenship. The
Speaker 1: very next year, nine she went with her mother and
Speaker 1: aunt on a trip to the Holy Land that wound
Speaker 1: up having just as deep an impact on her developing
Speaker 1: mind as the swastika. Now, Maximiani had never been very religious.
Speaker 1: Her mother and aunt were, though, and while they failed
Speaker 1: to inculcate a love of Christ in Maximiani, they did
Speaker 1: succeed in making her hate Jewish people, which is not
Speaker 1: the part of Christianity to transfer. If you're gonna pick
Speaker 1: one of all, well, I mean there's so many different
Speaker 1: horrible things to take away from Christianity, and that is, um,
Speaker 1: that is the worst of all. She got none of
Speaker 1: the good stuff, just the anti Semitism. Uh yeah, she um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not great. It's not great. I'm starting to think
Speaker 1: this lady maybe not so nice, not heading in a
Speaker 1: great direction. Yeah. Now, a lot of this was tied
Speaker 1: to the fact that Maximiani was so in love with
Speaker 1: Greek culture, and she was really piste off because she
Speaker 1: was like particularly love with like ancient Greek pagan culture,
Speaker 1: like the old Greek gods and their myths and stuff,
Speaker 1: and none of that stuff was very relevant other than
Speaker 1: it's like an academic thing by this point in history,
Speaker 1: and Christianity and Judaism were obviously hugely relevant in Europe,
Speaker 1: and she hated this, and she blamed the Jews for
Speaker 1: the fact that nobody other people weren't as into Greek
Speaker 1: history as she was, Like, this is like the core
Speaker 1: of it. For it was like she's in love with
Speaker 1: like Zeus and ship and she's like, why don't people
Speaker 1: like this as much as I do? If the Jews,
Speaker 1: she's become a chaos nerd. No, it's great, It's not great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's really bad. So her trip to the Holy Land
Speaker 1: with her mom and aunt was a bit of a
Speaker 1: weird one, Okay, I mean, I'm yeah. She was revolted
Speaker 1: by the obeisance they played to Judeo Christian holy sites,
Speaker 1: and as she touristed her way through old Jerusalem, she felt,
Speaker 1: in her biographer's words, overwhelmed and repelled by the exotic
Speaker 1: nature of the Jews. They're attired their customs, observances and festivals,
Speaker 1: the strange dark men and broad brimmed hats and long
Speaker 1: black coats hastening to prayers at the Wailing Wall. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's interesting that Goodwin Clark portuss biographer mentions this specifically,
Speaker 1: seeing these Jewish people and being like horrified by the
Speaker 1: way they look in their coats and hairlocks and long
Speaker 1: black coats. It's possible that precise moment never happened, but
Speaker 1: it's worth noting that this moment bears a striking resemblance
Speaker 1: to a tale Adolf Hitler told regularly about the supposed
Speaker 1: moment that he specifically gained his hatred of Jewish people.
Speaker 1: And here's how he wrote about that moment in mind
Speaker 1: comp this takes place in Lynz, no, sorry, in Austria Vienna. Once,
Speaker 1: since I was strolling through the inner city I suddenly
Speaker 1: encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hairlocks.
Speaker 1: Is this a jew? Was my first thought, for to
Speaker 1: be sure, they had not looked like that in Lenz,
Speaker 1: where he grew up. I observed the man furtively and cautiously.
Speaker 1: But the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing
Speaker 1: feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a
Speaker 1: new form. Is this a German? This is like a
Speaker 1: huge moment in like Hitler lore. It's possible that the
Speaker 1: reason that that portis writes her own think like her
Speaker 1: own story this way is that she's hearkening to mind Camp,
Speaker 1: because again, she writes about this later. It's also possible
Speaker 1: they just were similar people and had a similar moment.
Speaker 1: If she's the primary resource for herself, she seems to
Speaker 1: have like a fair grasp on storytelling. It makes sense
Speaker 1: that she would pull it doesn't make sense. She's like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is the end of Act one, where's my insighting?
Speaker 1: She needs she wrote her own insighting incident. If it didn't, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll take a leaf out of you know. It's like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, George Lucas uh stole from from Great Japanese
Speaker 1: Cinema to make Star Wars, and in a very similar fashion,
Speaker 1: Savitri Devi stole from Adolf Hitler, the of notchrue artists,
Speaker 1: Steele Rombert. It's what they it's what they been saying
Speaker 1: for generations. Yeah, that is funny. I mean I feel
Speaker 1: like that same logic of like you have to have
Speaker 1: a story to go with your hatred. They have that
Speaker 1: same logic on like Iron Chef, you know, like you
Speaker 1: have they have like there has to be a story
Speaker 1: that goes with this dish, and sometimes you're like, sometimes
Speaker 1: it just is she just cooks some fucking food, asshole.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you just make some food and it's bad and
Speaker 1: it's terrible. Yeah, so, uh, Maximiani would go on to
Speaker 1: claim that after this visit to the Holy Land, she
Speaker 1: decided that Hitler's campaign of hate against Jewish people was
Speaker 1: not just a matter of German concern, it was an
Speaker 1: international crusade. She came to believe that all of the
Speaker 1: formerly pagan nations of Europe had to throw off their
Speaker 1: Judeo Christian heritage and like reconnect with their pagan roots.
Speaker 1: Um And this is the first time she realizes that
Speaker 1: sees a national socialist, and she the way she described it,
Speaker 1: she realizes she's always been a national socialist, and so
Speaker 1: she falls fully in love with Hitler at this point,
Speaker 1: um And she's not a German Nazi though, And initially
Speaker 1: the way she decides to like act on this newfound
Speaker 1: Nazism is to basically try to revive Greek nationalism and
Speaker 1: pagan beliefs, kind of with the structure of national socialism
Speaker 1: over them. And so she returns to Athens and she
Speaker 1: sets to work trying to cobble together her own Greek
Speaker 1: version of not Seism, but focused around a religious component
Speaker 1: that involved return to worshiping the ancient Greek pantheon. I
Speaker 1: mean always this woman. Yeah. Uh. Now, by this point,
Speaker 1: the ancient Greeks had become sort of the Uberman in
Speaker 1: her own mind, and this conception was nursed by the
Speaker 1: bits of hitler speeches that made their way over into
Speaker 1: the press and her part of the world. By nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty she finally read Mind Camp for the very first time,
Speaker 1: which introduced Maximiani to Hitler's theories about the Aryan race.
Speaker 1: His ideas about the superior race consistently undermined by the
Speaker 1: evil Jews, jailed remarkably well with Maximiani's own beliefs about
Speaker 1: the ancient Greeks and the Jews. She became increasingly obsessed
Speaker 1: with the Arians and in part the idea of seeking
Speaker 1: out the remaining evidence of their existence, and at the
Speaker 1: time it was generally understood that India had been conquered
Speaker 1: and ruled by the Arians. Many among the weirder Nazi
Speaker 1: sets saw Hinduism as an example of a pure Aryan
Speaker 1: pagan tradition uncorrupted by Judaism. They found the Hindu cast
Speaker 1: system deeply intriguing as well for reasons that should be obvious,
Speaker 1: and enshrined a small number of superior beings and power
Speaker 1: over a vast number of less valuable individuals. In nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty two, Maximiani's father died and she decided to take
Speaker 1: this as an opportunity to travel to India to seek
Speaker 1: out the truth of the ancient Arians. It's like a
Speaker 1: Nazi version of Eat, Pray Love. Yeah, this is in
Speaker 1: another world. This is a very cute movie, and she
Speaker 1: just took every rod the same from it. It's you
Speaker 1: remember that horrible Cameron Crow movie Elizabethtown or Orlando Blue
Speaker 1: drive the Country with his dad's ashes and it's like,
Speaker 1: I'm glad we had this talk. And You're like, what
Speaker 1: the funk are you? That sounds like forty different movies, Jamie,
Speaker 1: It's no, it's the same. It's the same. All my
Speaker 1: elizabeth Town heads will know it's the same. Paula Dean's
Speaker 1: in that movie. Oh God, speaking of Nazis now. Um
Speaker 1: So Savitri decide she's gonna go to fucking India. And
Speaker 1: she's not the only person with this idea of going
Speaker 1: to India to seek out the Arians. In fact, the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five Heinrich Hemmler's s S founded the on
Speaker 1: a Nerby, a scientific think tank dedicated to finding evidence
Speaker 1: of the ancient Arians, and they actually sent multiple expeditions
Speaker 1: into India and Tibet. Maximiani went to India to find
Speaker 1: evidence of the Arians too, but she also went there
Speaker 1: to see firsthand evidence of a civilization founded upon what
Speaker 1: she believed was a natural racial hierarchy. She felt that
Speaker 1: Indian society looked how the world would appear in the
Speaker 1: year eight thousand, after six thousand years of Nazi rule,
Speaker 1: very specific women eight thousand. The Jonas Brothers didn't even
Speaker 1: think that far. You know that they're huge, the Naziment
Speaker 1: that I do not get that joke. The Jonas brothers
Speaker 1: first single in two thousand six or maybe seven was
Speaker 1: a song called year three thousand. They said, not much
Speaker 1: has changed, but we live underwater. That's all they knew about.
Speaker 1: That's a lot that age. Jamie. Well, they say that
Speaker 1: not much has Jade noted the underwater. It's a weird
Speaker 1: it makes no sense. Okay, saw Robert continue your podcast.
Speaker 1: But she's thinking to a year eight thousand, eight thousand,
Speaker 1: Kevin Jennis already has You have to give her credit.
Speaker 1: She is eight times as ambitious as Hitler. God. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So upon her arrival in the country, her beliefs were
Speaker 1: seemingly confirmed when she watched a parade celebrating Rama, a
Speaker 1: deified Aryan hero. The parade featured huge numbers of dark
Speaker 1: skinned Indians bowing and worshiping a lighter skinned statue of Rama.
Speaker 1: And Rama is most assuredly not white, although he is
Speaker 1: often depicted as lighter skinned, but he is. He's definitely Indian. Um.
Speaker 1: But it was not uncommon Europeans who were attracted to
Speaker 1: India in this period to decide that a number of
Speaker 1: ancient Hindu heroes and gods were in fact white. Um.
Speaker 1: This was like a common thing. And in fact, Maximiani's
Speaker 1: favorite poet who we talked about earlier, Laconte de Lisle,
Speaker 1: had actually written a poem about Rama that referred to
Speaker 1: him as Thou whose blood is pure, Thou whose body
Speaker 1: is white, and a subduer of all the profane races. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: everyone's a little bit of a Nazi in colonialism. That's
Speaker 1: kind of the deal. That's kind of their thing. It's
Speaker 1: kind of I mean that, yeah, not shocking. And if
Speaker 1: you're if you're interested in the story of Rama, one
Speaker 1: thing I would recommend it super accessible. There's a movie
Speaker 1: online by Nina Paley, who's a female graphic artist who's amazing,
Speaker 1: called Sita sings the blues. If you just google that,
Speaker 1: it's the whole movie is free. It's one of those
Speaker 1: beautiful pieces of animation. It's why I went to Indian
Speaker 1: in the first places. Incredible movie. Um. And one of
Speaker 1: the things that does really well is it has all
Speaker 1: these scenes where like individual like myths from like Hindu
Speaker 1: mythology are explained by like groups of people arguing about them, which,
Speaker 1: if you actually go to India, is how you learn
Speaker 1: about myths. Like if you talk about the myth of
Speaker 1: Sita and Rama to like a family, everyone in the family,
Speaker 1: you know, like like multiple different versions of the story,
Speaker 1: and people will argue with each other. Like it's not
Speaker 1: like Christian orthodoxy or whatever. Like it's very very complicated stuff,
Speaker 1: but fascinating. Um. So yeah. Maximiani is convinced that this
Speaker 1: guy's white though, um and she falls in love with
Speaker 1: India um and eventually finds her way to an ashram
Speaker 1: in Bengal, where she's able to live cheap and learn
Speaker 1: Hindi and study Hindu religious traditions. She gets a job
Speaker 1: outside of Delhi teaching English and Indian history, and she
Speaker 1: grew more and more taken with Hinduism, until in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty six she adopted a Hindu name, Savitri Devi, taken
Speaker 1: from a Hindu solar goddess. This woman is obsessed with
Speaker 1: gods and goddess, loves gods and goddess is so much.
Speaker 1: She's such a dork. Yeah, it's specifically sun gods and goddesses.
Speaker 1: She's fucking obsessed with akat in two. It's weird. There
Speaker 1: was a girl in my middle school who was like,
Speaker 1: call me Artemis, and we were like, no, okay, no,
Speaker 1: we did, we did and are and and if I
Speaker 1: was also a dork, but not that kind of dork god. No,
Speaker 1: I was just a normal, bright eyes loving dork. I'm
Speaker 1: a big believer in calling people by whatever name they
Speaker 1: prefer to be referred to, unless it's the name of
Speaker 1: a god or goddess. Then I just start, I just
Speaker 1: get furious. Yeah, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna push
Speaker 1: that behavior. Well, she was. She was Artemis for all
Speaker 1: of eighth grade, and then she went back to uh,
Speaker 1: just just Alex for the rest of that. As far
Speaker 1: as I know her life, that's fine. Yeah, yeah, any
Speaker 1: other name really now. Early on in her time in India,
Speaker 1: Savitri had hiked to the top of a hill and
Speaker 1: seeing a beautiful Indian fortress, one of many such colossal
Speaker 1: ancient relics that dot the country. She was taken by
Speaker 1: its beauty and equally horrified a more modern Jesuit hospital
Speaker 1: that had been constructed nearby. This was powerfully symbolic to her,
Speaker 1: and she claimed that it cemented in her a deep
Speaker 1: need to protect Hindu India from being infected by Judaeo
Speaker 1: Christian taint. Starting in nineteen thirty seven, she began working
Speaker 1: as an anti Christian preacher for Swami Satyananda's Hindu mission
Speaker 1: in Calcutta. For two years, she criss crossed the country,
Speaker 1: meeting with various tribal elders and arranging public debates with
Speaker 1: Christian missionaries. And I'd like to quote now from an
Speaker 1: article by konrad Elst, an indiologist who's analyzed this history. Quote.
Speaker 1: Thoroughly familiar with the mentality and methods of her adversary,
Speaker 1: she could destroy the credit of the imported religion in
Speaker 1: the minds of the villagers and prevent or undo many conversions.
Speaker 1: There was a sharp contradiction between her own racist and
Speaker 1: anti egalitarian convictions and the reformist and egalitarian program of
Speaker 1: the Hindu mission. To the Hindu mission, Hinduism was a
Speaker 1: value to in itself. To Savitri Devi, it was but
Speaker 1: an instrument of her imagined Aryan race. In her years
Speaker 1: as a preacher, she kept her non Hindu preoccupations to herself,
Speaker 1: but in her memoirs uh she declared that she conceived
Speaker 1: of her reconversion mission as an exercise and deception. From
Speaker 1: the racist arian viewpoint, it was necessary to give the
Speaker 1: most backward and degenerate Aborigines a false Hindu consciousness. She wrote.
Speaker 1: This is one of the major areas where you'll run
Speaker 1: into disputes about Savitri Devi. The common view on her
Speaker 1: legacy is spoiler that she proposed a synthesis between Hinduism
Speaker 1: and Nazism, and aspects of this are true, But it
Speaker 1: would be more accurate to say that she found Hinduism
Speaker 1: a useful tool for advancing Nazism. Um and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote again from else essay. In contrast with the Hindu nationalists,
Speaker 1: but in tune with Indian Marxists and Castists, she believed
Speaker 1: that the concept nation and a program of nationalism could
Speaker 1: not apply to India. In nineteen thirty eight, she used
Speaker 1: the slogan make every Hindu and Indian nationalist, and every
Speaker 1: Indian nationalist to Hindu. Now, this seems to be something
Speaker 1: not legitimately yeah, and she didn't really believe it. In
Speaker 1: her autobiography years later, she expressed the belief that nationalism
Speaker 1: could only exist within members of the same race, and
Speaker 1: she thought that all the different casts in India were
Speaker 1: different races. And we're getting into the weeds here too much.
Speaker 1: But it's important to understand for what comes next that
Speaker 1: Sabitri Devi advocated for Hindu nationalism, but not because she
Speaker 1: believed strongly in it, because she saw it as a
Speaker 1: useful tool for harming the British Empire in advancing Nazism
Speaker 1: main goal. So she's merely co opting it for her
Speaker 1: own sinister purposes. It's a little more complicated than that,
Speaker 1: because she also loves it, like she's She's takes on
Speaker 1: a lot of Hindu beliefs. It's this is a weird
Speaker 1: story and there's no like, super simple answer to it.
Speaker 1: But it's not as simple as she just becomes Hindu
Speaker 1: and also Nazi. Like it's weirder than that too. No
Speaker 1: one edited this out I need people to know what
Speaker 1: what I've been forced to endure. You just like literally
Speaker 1: did that into the microphone. Literally it was hard. I
Speaker 1: had to. I'm sorry. I can see Robert right now.
Speaker 1: And he wiped his nose on the mic and he
Speaker 1: was lit it and then licked it. You licked it.
Speaker 1: All of this gets edited out now. Many Hindu nationalists
Speaker 1: were very bullish about the Nazis because Great Britain owned
Speaker 1: India and ruled it as a brutal colonial oppressor, and
Speaker 1: they figured, you know, the enemy of my enemy, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: Not all of them felt this way. There were a
Speaker 1: lot of Hindu nationalists who were against the Nazis because
Speaker 1: they were like, well, but their Nazis, um, so again
Speaker 1: paying everybody with the same brush. Yeah, But Savitri got
Speaker 1: along very well with the set of Hindu nationalists who
Speaker 1: are like, yeah, the Nazi seemed good, um. And she's
Speaker 1: particularly taken with Dr Asit Krishna Mukherji, when, of India's
Speaker 1: few actual committed Nazis in nineteen thirty seven and thirty eight,
Speaker 1: Mukerji started to publish a bi monthly pro Nazi magazine,
Speaker 1: The New Mercury. Savitri met him in early nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 1: And they didn't instantly fall in love, um, but she
Speaker 1: fell in love with like his mind. She was probably bisexual, um,
Speaker 1: but certainly wasn't interested in Mukerji in any way. But
Speaker 1: she falls in love with like this guy's Nazism. Basically
Speaker 1: they're that kind of so they're in God, that's so,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not gad, that's bleak because it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're going to marry a Nazi and
Speaker 1: they're you're not even attracted to them, no excuse, no
Speaker 1: excuse you, but you know what I mean. She has
Speaker 1: a little bit of an excuse, but we're getting to it.
Speaker 1: So you are cutting love lady, all kinds of slack, Robert.
Speaker 1: I'm just explaining her. Do you have a crop? Now?
Speaker 1: She so, she she doesn't. They don't get together right away.
Speaker 1: She loves his understanding of Nazi ideology, and particularly his
Speaker 1: emphasis on the mythst of the Old arians U and
Speaker 1: Mukerji was like obsessed with the Thule Society of the
Speaker 1: tool of society, and it acquired a lot of their
Speaker 1: occult writing. So he's like that kind of nerd, and
Speaker 1: Mukerji seems to like genuinely appreciate Savitri's ideas and the
Speaker 1: fact that she was just as much of a nerd
Speaker 1: for Nazism as he was, but he was baffled by
Speaker 1: her insistence on staying in India while Nazi Germany like
Speaker 1: rose to the heights of its power in early nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty nine, He asked her, what have you been doing
Speaker 1: in India all these years, with your ideas and your potentialities,
Speaker 1: wasting your time and energy. Go back to Europe, where
Speaker 1: duty calls you. Go and help the rebirth of Aryan Heathendom,
Speaker 1: where there are still Arians strong and wide awake. Go
Speaker 1: to him who was truly life and resurrection, the leader
Speaker 1: of the Third Reich. Go at once. Next year will
Speaker 1: be too late. And he was kind of right about that,
Speaker 1: but he was convinced that she could do Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm like, well historically okay, yeah. Savitri, though, was convinced
Speaker 1: that she could do more for the cause of Nazism
Speaker 1: in India than in Germany. She'd become close with members
Speaker 1: of the rush Tria Swam Savik Song or RSS, an
Speaker 1: India Hindu nationalist movement that were very similar to the Nazis.
Speaker 1: The founder or One of the founders, be Hedgwar, formed
Speaker 1: the group to defend Hindu society from daily onslaughts by outsiders,
Speaker 1: and he included Muslim Indians as members of that group.
Speaker 1: Like all fascist organizations, the RSS had a uniform khaki shorts,
Speaker 1: a white shirt and a black cap. RSS members met
Speaker 1: daily to train with bamboo beatsticks called lathis and to
Speaker 1: learn about Hindutva Hindu nationalism. In nineteen thirty nine, Savitri
Speaker 1: wrote a warning to the Hindus. The books Forward was
Speaker 1: written by G. D. Savarkar brothers to one of the
Speaker 1: co founders of the r s S and, according to
Speaker 1: an article by South Asian affairs analyst Peter Friedrick, quote
Speaker 1: DEVII advanced VD Savarkar's thesis of Hindutva that India is
Speaker 1: a Hindu nation of Hindu people and only for Hindu people.
Speaker 1: She claimed that Hindu society is India itself, called Hinduism
Speaker 1: the national religion of India and suggested that Hindu should
Speaker 1: tell non Hindus, we represent India, not you. Therefore India
Speaker 1: is ours, not yours. She urged Hindus to recover, along
Speaker 1: with their national consciousness, their military virtues of old to
Speaker 1: rebecome a military race. The method, she said, should be
Speaker 1: the organization of the young men and pledge bound military
Speaker 1: like batches with Hindu nationalism as their only ideal. And
Speaker 1: here's where I pause to note that the current Prime
Speaker 1: Minister of India, Narindra Modi, is a member of the RSS.
Speaker 1: A warning to Hindus is still considered to be a
Speaker 1: deeply influential text within the Hindu nationalist movement and the RSS.
Speaker 1: Moody probably read it as a child and a list
Speaker 1: of his crimes. And the thousands of murders and mosque
Speaker 1: bombings and beatings carried out by Hindu nationalists against Indian
Speaker 1: Muslims would go beyond the scope of this episode, but
Speaker 1: it is worth noting that the current authoritarian lurched by India,
Speaker 1: the world's largest democracy, owes at least a decent amount
Speaker 1: to the work of Savitri Devi. So that's cool. You're
Speaker 1: in love with her? Are? Oh my god? I mean
Speaker 1: it is a sign of where this is going that
Speaker 1: I kind of glossed over the fact that she played
Speaker 1: a role in the establishment of what's starting to become
Speaker 1: a fascist dictatorship in India. We just have so much
Speaker 1: the ground to cover. We have so much to cover.
Speaker 1: We don't have time for the fascist dictatorship today. We
Speaker 1: have some time, but yeah, okay, okay, well we'll make time.
Speaker 1: We'll make time for the fashion. In nineteen forty Britain
Speaker 1: and Germany went to war. Savitri's extremist beliefs were well
Speaker 1: known at this point, and she was forced to marry
Speaker 1: Mukerjee in order to stay in the country. So that's
Speaker 1: why they get married. It's a it's basically a green
Speaker 1: card thing. Yeah, got it. She described it as a
Speaker 1: sexless marriage, primarily to allow her to stay in the country,
Speaker 1: and she did what she could for Nazism while in India,
Speaker 1: spying on British military positions for the access and facilitating
Speaker 1: communication between sub hos Chandra Bose, leader of the National
Speaker 1: Indian Army of pro Axis Group, and the Japanese government.
Speaker 1: In a different world, these contributions might have played a
Speaker 1: role in a Japanese invasion of India, but World War
Speaker 1: Two went the way it did, and Hitler eventually shot
Speaker 1: himself at a bunker to avoid capture. Familiar Vitree learned
Speaker 1: of his death through an overheard conversation from two Muslim
Speaker 1: men on the Marabar Coast. She was inconsolable for days
Speaker 1: over the death of her hero and the end of
Speaker 1: the belief system she had dedicated her life to championing,
Speaker 1: but mcare she told her not to worry. This was
Speaker 1: merely part of the cycle of ages, and the dark
Speaker 1: age brought on by Hitler's defeat would someday end, And likewise, Jamie,
Speaker 1: one of this episode must now end, but this dark
Speaker 1: age will continue on Thursday with part two of the
Speaker 1: story of Savitri Devon. No, okay, how you doing, Jamie.
Speaker 1: I'm look, I'm just unclenching. That's important for the next
Speaker 1: two minutes, and then we can talk about it again.
Speaker 1: Always be clenching. Yeah, go plug your plug doubles. First,
Speaker 1: Oh right, uh leave that in. I want people to
Speaker 1: know that I had And also leave in Robert blowing
Speaker 1: his nose on the mic. Then Chris, leave that in.
Speaker 1: You can edit out. It's going to be horrible, Chris.
Speaker 1: You can edit out the part where Robert is like
Speaker 1: young Delicious after licking his own not off the mic,
Speaker 1: but everything else should probably stay in. I feel like
Speaker 1: this is legally abuse. You could probably report me to
Speaker 1: h R. Could be fun. Could be fine. My Twitter
Speaker 1: is Jamie Loft. This help on my Instagram is at
Speaker 1: Jamie christ Superstar and I'm touring for the better part
Speaker 1: of February. You can go to my website Jamie lofts
Speaker 1: is Innocent dot com to find out where yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: and you can find Sophie on Twitter finding her at
Speaker 1: Why Underscore Sophie Underscore Why, And that's it. That's all
Speaker 1: you can find of us online, which you're on Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards dot com, including the full free text of
Speaker 1: Hitler's Priestess if you want to read this book. Um,
Speaker 1: the episodes over go stop the French from murdering cats? Yes, great,