0:00

M

0:03

what esoteric

0:06

my hitler ISM's

0:08

ship that is two hitler

0:10

starts in a row. Jesus

0:12

Robert, Well it fits

0:15

with this episode. This is Behind

0:17

the Bastards podcast about the worst people in all

0:19

of history. I'm Robert Evans. I'm

0:21

the host, and my guest today is

0:24

Jamie.

0:25

Hi.

0:26

I just go Jamie one name.

0:28

Now.

0:28

I'm the Beyonce

0:31

of No Billy Wayne's, the Beyonce of Behind the

0:33

Bastards.

0:34

Yeah, you are the podcaster

0:37

formerly known as the Beyonce of Behind

0:39

the Bastards.

0:40

Yeah, they're the Beyonce of my heart. Thank

0:42

you.

0:43

Yeah, there we go, Here we go. Oh

0:46

Jamie, how are you doing today?

0:48

I'm good. I'm good.

0:49

I I think that that's true.

0:51

I'm good.

0:52

I have to add I have to add it probably good. I have

0:54

to add a bag to my Spirit Airlines flight.

0:57

But that's about as as challenging

0:59

as it's getting to day.

1:01

Speaking of monsters, that is

1:03

the greatest monster of all online

1:06

interface.

1:07

Yeah, you had to like swipe your credit card

1:09

if you sneeze on a Spirit our Lines.

1:13

I have this friend,

1:15

his name is Lenny, and he listens to the podcast,

1:18

so he may hear this and Lenny is one

1:21

of the one of the most experienced travelers

1:23

I know, and at one point I was taking a

1:25

flight with him in Eastern Europe to Ukraine

1:27

through whizz Air, which is one of the worst airlines

1:30

plane I've heard of.

1:31

Whizz Air.

1:32

Yeah, they're terrible.

1:33

Never had the pleasure.

1:36

There was a moment where they started hassling

1:38

us about our bags and it became clear that we weren't

1:40

going to be able to like fit everything

1:42

like that, we were going to have to take stuff out. And

1:45

the line from him that I'll never forget was I guess,

1:48

well, I guess I'm wearing all my pants today.

1:51

I've bore multiple pairs of pants on how

1:54

if you're not going onto his Spirit Airlines

1:56

flight wearing five jackets?

1:59

Like what you you're you're

2:01

grabbing yourself, You're I've

2:04

been on a Spirit Airlines red eye

2:06

next to like an actively drunk

2:08

person multiple

2:10

times.

2:10

Although that's just normal, I.

2:13

Know, but I think, yeah,

2:15

you're right.

2:16

If you haven't wept, if you haven't

2:18

wept and thrown things away while

2:21

waiting to get in line at Spirit Airlines,

2:23

have you even flown? We've

2:27

gotten off topic, very

2:31

off topic, Jamie, Yes, have you

2:33

ever heard of Savitri dev

2:36

No? Oh good, oh

2:38

boy, Jamie, you are in for a motherfucking

2:40

treat. Ooh.

2:41

I love when you don't tell me an advance.

2:44

Okay, okay, Yeah, this

2:46

is one I'm gonna guess almost nobody

2:48

listening to has heard of. But she's one of the

2:51

most important people for understanding

2:53

where we are right now in the year twenty

2:56

twenty, Like the most the most

2:58

recent headline that ties directly to you.

3:00

Remember when the FBI arrested all those members of

3:02

the base, that that neo Nazi group, there's plenty

3:04

to start a second Civil War by randomly

3:07

firing into a crowd in Virginia that was

3:09

full of armed people. Yeah, that whole,

3:11

the whole hulla balloo. Yes, yeah,

3:14

Well she's kinda behind all that, although

3:16

she died decades before it happened. So

3:18

that's today's story.

3:20

Nice, let's do it.

3:23

So now, Jamie, we're gonna start like

3:26

we start every good day by talking

3:28

about our loll buddy. Shouldn't

3:30

call him a buddy, Adolf Hitler. Oh,

3:32

it's weird because I can call Stalin a buddy, but

3:34

I feel like calling Hitler a Buddy's a bridge too far.

3:36

I don't know on this show, I feel like there are just rules

3:39

that are different.

3:40

Yeah, they're they're old friends at this point.

3:42

So, yeah, Hitler was at

3:46

he was a secular ruler, Jamie. He

3:49

was not a not a not a not a.

3:52

I think I think there's a lot of misconceptions about

3:54

kind of the nature of his power

3:56

and like his regime because of all of these like

3:58

History Channel documentary, in this industry

4:00

of books on Nazi occult history and like

4:03

Nazi magic and the hell Boy movies

4:06

like to hear it, Yeah, yeah, I mean they're

4:08

great movies, at least one of them is. But

4:11

like this idea that like the

4:13

Nazis were like full of full

4:15

of magic, right, and that Hitler like believed

4:18

all sorts of like weird kooky

4:20

occult stuff about like raising the dead

4:23

and aliens and shit, and

4:25

it's just not true. There

4:27

were some funky occult ties to national

4:29

socialism, but they were phrase

4:31

oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah, cult

4:34

ties, yeah baby yeah,

4:37

But they weren't to Hitler. They were to like kind

4:40

of like side figures, like the b List

4:42

of the Nazis. A lot of those guys were kind

4:44

of into the occult, but like your A listers

4:47

really were pretty secular

4:49

guys.

4:49

Beyonces the Nazi Beyonce

4:51

is as I'm trying

4:53

to think of, like.

4:54

Like the the Nazi Jeremy Renners.

4:57

Oh, how dare you speak his

5:00

name in this forum?

5:01

I thought we made a pact

5:04

to never speak of him again.

5:06

We never signed that contract.

5:08

We never did.

5:09

It was under negotiation for a long

5:11

time.

5:12

Yeah, it is still in arbitration

5:17

now. The Toulliss Society spelled

5:20

Thule Society like the top racks on

5:22

people's jeeps? Was it? Well?

5:24

Suberus people Suberus. The

5:27

Tullas Society was a German ocult group in the early

5:29

twentieth century in Germany,

5:32

and it provided some of the early funding and leadership

5:34

for the Nazi Party. Heinrich Himmler held

5:36

bizarre quasi magical beliefs for his whole

5:39

time in power, and he was kind of into some weird He thought

5:41

he was like a reincarnated prince and

5:43

some shit. Sure, but Hitler himself was

5:45

not at all into occult stuff. And

5:49

the only guy really close to him who was

5:51

was Rudolph Hess, who was his deputy and

5:53

for a long time his best friend. This is the guy he like co

5:55

wrote minekompf with like Hess and

5:57

Hitler are like fucking type before Hitler.

6:00

His ghost his ghost

6:02

writer.

6:04

Yeah, kind of like more like his

6:06

his muse. Yeah, and also the guy

6:08

who was a competent typist

6:11

both.

6:11

I mean, you got you gotta if

6:14

your muse is also a competent typist.

6:17

Yeah.

6:17

Who says the perfect person doesn't exist?

6:20

Yeah, Rudolph has That's what people say

6:22

about Rudolph Has is he was the perfect person.

6:25

So he

6:27

was also the deputy fearer for a while oh

6:30

six. Yeah,

6:32

he was a cool dude, but he

6:34

wasn't really in the picture for very long. He got increasingly

6:37

marginalized after Hitler came to power in thirty

6:39

three, and in nineteen forty

6:41

one he kind of went bug fuck and

6:44

got on a plane and flew to

6:46

Great Britain while the two countries

6:48

were at war. Sorry sorry, sorry?

6:50

How would you define bug

6:53

fuck?

6:54

I would define bug fluck is like independently

6:58

hopping in your private plane and flying

7:00

to a country that your country is actively

7:02

bombing to try to parachute

7:04

down and negotiate for peace

7:06

between your two nations without anyone

7:09

asking me to. I

7:11

would describe that as pretty bug fuck. Yeah,

7:14

that's not This.

7:15

Is like a new term for me, and now this

7:18

is the only like reference

7:20

point I have for it, So I'm not gonna

7:22

know how to how

7:24

to define bug fuck moving forward.

7:26

Okay, So bug fuck is when like

7:28

the world is falling apart and you're like

7:31

fuck it and you go the fuck off

7:33

and then you is that.

7:34

It kind of yeah,

7:36

like it was the kind of thing where like there was no chance of

7:38

it ever working. He did not have the authority

7:41

to sign a peace treaty for Germany,

7:44

and Britain did not have any interest

7:46

in talking with him or making peace

7:48

with Germany at this point sick. So

7:51

he basically just flew and crash landed

7:54

in England and got arrested and spent the

7:56

rest of his life in prison. Very much

7:58

And it was a huge embarrassment

8:01

for Hitler because this this is like his right hand man

8:03

who in the middle of the war like flies to his

8:05

enemies country to like try to negotiate

8:08

without Hitler's approval. It was it was very

8:10

weird. And because Hess

8:12

was like this occult dude into astrology

8:15

and all this shit and like this weird, he was

8:17

actually kind of like a Buddhist, like he's a weird

8:19

dude. But because

8:21

he held all these weird beliefs and he pissed

8:24

off Hitler so badly, Hitler bans

8:26

like all of this weird occult shit that had cropped

8:28

up around the Nazi party in nineteen forty

8:31

one. Okay, so yeah,

8:33

so after forty one, like really

8:35

most of that stuff is illegal. Heinrich Himler

8:37

gets up to a little bit of it with the SS because he's

8:39

got a castle and he he's just a weird dude.

8:42

We'll get into some of that in the later episode. The

8:44

important thing to understand is that, like, yeah, Hitler

8:46

was like a distinctly not wooy

8:49

guy, Like he's not a new age sort

8:51

of dude.

8:52

He's like a dive.

8:53

If you mentioned you're like if I He's

8:55

like the guys on Reddit who

8:58

like, if you mentioned you so much as mention

9:00

your zodiac sign, they're like, she's

9:03

not credible, she's fine, she's

9:05

a she's lost.

9:06

Yes, I love that

9:09

type of person.

9:10

And I feel confident saying

9:12

that one hundred percent of Hitler's biographers

9:15

agree he would have been extremely

9:17

on Reddit. I oh, more

9:19

on Reddit than anyone has ever been

9:21

on red.

9:22

Sure.

9:22

Yeah, no, he would be the most reddity guy

9:24

of all of them. And we have

9:27

to admit that that is very

9:29

what's his sign? That's

9:33

that's very his sign of him.

9:35

Wouldn't you say, I

9:38

don't know, he's such.

9:40

A Taurus He's sure?

9:43

Sure, Okay, continue, that's I

9:46

assume you're referring to the maker

9:48

of really shoddy handguns,

9:51

uh, which is I think they're Brazilian

9:53

terrible guns.

9:54

To Okay, Now, I'm just trying to on

9:57

the behind the bastards board.

9:59

Now, either way, advocating

10:02

the Taurus sign or the Taurus firearms

10:05

brand is not going to go well for you.

10:06

Okay.

10:09

So yeah,

10:12

so now Hitler, so he's not into the

10:14

occult at all. He's not a big fan of Christianity

10:17

either. He felt it was fundamentally Jewish

10:19

because Jesus was Jewish, which is, you

10:21

know, not an irrational point of view

10:24

within the logic of being a Nazi, and

10:26

he worried weaken the German people. But he also

10:29

respected Christianity for its ability to

10:31

inculcate good values in the German people,

10:34

and the primary good value it inculcated was making

10:36

lots of babies. Because most Germans were Catholic,

10:39

and Catholics aren't big fans

10:41

of condoms. I'm not sure if

10:43

you're aware of that.

10:44

Ummm no, I

10:46

know. I wouldn't have MS if it weren't

10:48

for this.

10:49

Attitude, none of us

10:51

would. Now. Hitler

10:53

himself was a baptized Roman Catholic all his life.

10:55

He probably didn't really believe much of anything

10:58

other than that that Hitler would a cool dude,

11:01

but he felt it was important to maintain this image.

11:04

Now.

11:04

There were some among his followers thought it was Nazism's

11:07

destiny to become the new Great German religion,

11:09

but Hitler himself pushed back against this,

11:11

insisting in mind kompt that national socialism

11:14

quote is not a religious reform, but a political

11:16

reorganization of the German people. He

11:19

believed quote it is criminal to try to

11:21

destroy the accepted faith of the people as

11:23

long as there is nothing to replace it. And

11:25

it is possible that given enough time, Hitler would have

11:27

tried to replace Christianity with something else,

11:30

but he never attempted to do so. And as far as

11:32

we know, the supernatural as

11:34

it's generally known, played very little role

11:36

in the Nazi regime. But and

11:39

here's where the real episode starts. In

11:41

the decades since Hitler shot himself in that

11:43

bunker in nineteen forty five, Nazism

11:45

has changed quite a lot. The actual

11:47

political and historic beliefs of the original

11:50

Nazis and of Hitler himself have been twisted and shifted

11:52

into something even weirder. It would be too

11:54

much to say that this new form of Nazism is

11:56

more dangerous than the original, given the

11:59

tens of millions people who died from the original

12:01

Nazism, but it's probably

12:04

accurate to say that the fact that Nazism

12:06

has mutated into what we call esoteric

12:08

Hitlerism has made it better

12:11

able to survive in the era of the Internet.

12:14

Now, Esoteric Hitlerism is a term

12:16

used to refer to a number of different strains

12:18

of post war Nazi thought that put a bizarre

12:20

religious and occult spin on Nazi

12:22

racial theories and on Hitler himself,

12:25

often seeing the man as essentially the avatar

12:27

of a god. Four Chan and eight

12:30

Chan are in the modern age, two of the most prolific

12:32

vectors for the spread of this brand of

12:34

nonsense. Sure, there are strains of it in Brenton

12:37

Terrence Manifesto, and in Anders Brevik's

12:39

manifesto. And today we're

12:41

talking about the woman who invented all of this, the

12:43

single person who became the living link between

12:46

the Nazism that tried and failed to conquer

12:48

Europe and the modern Nazi movement that

12:50

spawns mass shootings and attempted mass shootings

12:52

on a monthly basis. Today. Her name

12:55

was Savitri Devi and she was a huge piece

12:57

of shit.

12:58

This is someone's feminism somewhere.

13:01

Yeah, this is some piece of shit's feminism.

13:04

She is a feminist icon.

13:06

Feministic feminism is the law.

13:08

Now.

13:09

This is a woman who spent her whole

13:11

life living alone with a pile of cats

13:14

and changing Nazism forever.

13:16

Okay, well what if she just did the first half?

13:18

You know that she

13:21

was not willing to do just the first She

13:23

was like, okay, so I'm in a pile of cats.

13:26

That's great, what else could I do?

13:28

And that was her second idea. That's embarrassed, that was.

13:30

Her second idea. As she

13:33

does start first focused on the cats

13:35

and then moves straight to Nazism though, it's

13:38

remarkable. Yeah. So

13:41

she was born Maximiani

13:43

Portas on September thirtieth,

13:45

nineteen oh five in Lyon, France.

13:48

Her mother, Julia, came from Cornwall,

13:50

the town with the thirty sixth dumbest name

13:52

in all of England. Her father's ancestry

13:55

was a mi longe of various Mediterranean peoples

13:57

without access to birth control. He was

13:59

mostly at Italian in Greek. Although young

14:01

Maximiani was born a French citizen,

14:04

she latched onto her father's Greek ancestry

14:06

from the very beginning. Some of this had

14:08

to do with the fact that Leon had a large and active

14:11

Greek expat community, and her dad was

14:13

a prominent member of it. She also nursed

14:15

an early fascination with Roman history.

14:17

Her name Maximiani was actually

14:19

just the female form of Maximian,

14:22

the proper first name of the emperor Marcus

14:24

Aurelius. So's a she's a

14:26

big old nerd. I really have to emphasize

14:28

what a nerd she is.

14:29

I feel like I've met versions

14:31

of this girl in like sophomore

14:33

English classes and they're like, actually something

14:36

something, and you're like stop at stop

14:38

at plea is just like finish

14:41

reading.

14:41

Their eyes were watching God, Let's move on.

14:44

I was the male version of this for

14:46

a while. I mean, I took three years of Latin because

14:48

I was such a Roman history nerd.

14:51

Okay, Robert, some of us took five years

14:53

of Latin. And do we remember a fucking thing?

14:55

Of course, no, no, not

14:58

a goddamn word.

15:00

Like when I was in high school, like in junior high.

15:02

In high school, if you were like in the quote unquote advanced

15:04

classes, they would be like, let's teach them a language

15:06

they can't use so stupid, god.

15:09

Damn totally useless term. Did you have to use

15:11

me?

15:11

That's one of those did you

15:13

have to use that textbook that was about the the Romani

15:16

family?

15:16

Did you do Eka Romani?

15:18

Oh no, no, man, I was like fucking Kills

15:21

and Quintus. I remember those names. They

15:23

were like the fucking there. It was

15:25

like a bunch of Pompeii people who all

15:27

die at the end of the book. Everyone

15:30

died at the end of our textbook.

15:32

Was it like we we

15:35

have the We had the Cornelia family.

15:37

It was like Cornelia and her

15:40

brother Marcus, and then they had a friend

15:42

named Sextus.

15:43

Who knows, they sound like fucking losers,

15:45

they weren't they?

15:47

For me, there, your your family

15:50

sounds way better because our family there was like three

15:52

books in total, and the whole second book,

15:55

So like all of eighth and ninth grade, they're

15:57

just stuck in a ditch. They're like in

15:59

a ditch. Their characters in a ditch. They can't get out.

16:02

They're staying at an inn. The innkeeper's yelling

16:04

at them. They're stuck in a dick. They're stuck in a ditch

16:06

for a whole month, and then they go to Rome

16:08

and and everything is fine.

16:11

It sounds like a nightmare. Second

16:13

well, yeah, nightmare, so

16:15

horrible. Maximiani would

16:17

have gotten a lot. Well, no, she wouldn't have. She would have been

16:20

the most annoying person in our Latin class.

16:23

Yeah.

16:23

I don't like when people are in the Latin class

16:25

and they're also like into it. I'm like, we

16:28

should learn.

16:29

You didn't have to learn to pronounce anything,

16:32

right, You never had to speak because

16:34

there was a dead.

16:36

Reason to speak it.

16:38

Well, no one knows either, like you've

16:40

got ecclesiastical Latin, but there's no way

16:42

to know if it was exactly the same as what the Romans

16:44

spoke. So we just didn't give a shit. It was great.

16:46

Yeah, Teacher ms Cook would come

16:48

and she would what was the thing she would say,

16:51

she was like, okay,

16:53

dysipuarly at this dy

16:55

skipuli. Like she'd be like, hello, students,

16:58

let's learn Jewela Caesar,

17:00

and then we would just talk about how the family

17:03

was stuck in the ditch all day.

17:05

All day horrible.

17:06

Yeah.

17:07

Well, Maximiani spent her young

17:09

life stuck in that ditch, and that ditch was

17:11

called being a huge nerd for Mediterranean

17:14

classical civilizations. She

17:17

was a strong willed child, which

17:19

here is a synonym for unspeakably arrogant

17:21

and a giant pain in the ass. She felt

17:24

strongly about just about everything, children

17:28

and everything. Yeah. Strong willed.

17:30

Yeah.

17:32

She was known to be utterly immovable once she'd

17:34

latched onto an idea. One strong

17:36

opinion she developed early was that British people

17:38

were terrible, which is not inaccurate. She

17:41

hated her mother's English friends and the way they prattled

17:43

on about illnesses and their dying families.

17:47

Harsh.

17:48

God, that's so harsh.

17:50

I wish my family wasn't dying, and she's like.

17:52

Shut up, Jesus Christ,

17:55

Yeah, we get it. She

17:58

didn't like French people very much much either, and

18:00

the particular cause for her hatred of the French

18:03

was the French Revolution. She read about it as

18:05

a little girl in school and was instantly

18:07

furious. The Republican ideals of equality,

18:10

liberty, and fraternity disgusted her.

18:12

She was punished at school for making an obscene

18:14

gesture at a plaque of the Declaration of

18:16

the Rights of Man. And again,

18:19

she's like eight or nine. Yeah, she's like

18:21

a fucking little kid at this point.

18:23

That is that is so funny.

18:26

Yeah.

18:27

The Declaration of the Rights of Man, which

18:29

small child Savitri Devi flipped

18:31

off, includes such controversial takes

18:33

as people are innocent until proven guilty,

18:36

people have the right to liberty, property, security,

18:39

and resistance to oppression. And people

18:41

should be able to speak and write with freedom. Wow.

18:45

Some real hot sh run

18:47

out there. Yeah, geez, Okay,

18:49

so she was like born.

18:51

To be harmful, she

18:54

was born to be a fascist. As

18:56

a small child, she's like, people aren't equal? What is

18:58

this bullshit?

19:01

That's so the little flipping

19:03

off to human rights? You do

19:06

you do feel like we should have known, we

19:08

should have known.

19:09

I mean, I love flipping off

19:11

old documents too, But to me,

19:13

it's the Magna carta and the Magna Carta knows

19:16

why.

19:16

The Magna Carta knows what she did.

19:19

Oh yeah, the Magna Carta shakes in her

19:21

boots whenever you come walk.

19:22

The Magna Carta is a messy bitch,

19:25

and I have no time for it.

19:26

That okay, Robert, I

19:29

can't believe you just called a female

19:31

document a.

19:32

Bitch a messy.

19:34

You're setting a bad example,

19:37

Robert.

19:37

Feminism is document misogyny.

19:40

She's she's literally shaking

19:43

right now. She's here.

19:45

Oh no, she's in the room with you. You didn't tell

19:47

me the Magna Carta was in the room today.

19:49

She's literally she drove me here.

19:52

Horrible.

19:53

She's, well, I don't want a driver's license. I don't know what you

19:55

want.

19:56

I don't know how much further to take this bit, Jamie,

19:59

So I'm just gonna Later

20:01

in life, in nineteen seventy eight, Savitri

20:03

Devi told an interviewer a beautiful girl

20:05

is not equal to an ugly girl. So she remained

20:08

pretty consistent about her belief in the fundamental

20:10

inequality of human beings like

20:12

her whole life.

20:13

And she's getting really granular about it too.

20:16

Yeah, yeah, okay, she's granular

20:18

about fucking everything. Her

20:20

chief motivating factor in her childhood,

20:23

I have to say was completely understandable.

20:26

She felt a deep, powerful sense

20:28

of rage at the abuse of animals by

20:30

human beings. Okay, starting at age five.

20:32

Yeah, starting at age five, she began expressing

20:34

to her parents concern at the abuse of animals

20:37

she witnessed in a daily basis. She was

20:39

horrified by circuses, the fur trade,

20:41

and the eating of meat. While still in elementary

20:43

school, she became a committed vegetarian and eventually

20:45

a vegan. Maximiani Portos

20:48

was particularly disgusted by the abuse

20:50

of cats by peasants on the French countryside.

20:53

Her only real biographer, Nicholas Gudrich

20:55

Clark, claims this quote disgusted

20:57

her and turned her against mannedkind. And

21:00

since most people listening probably don't know anything

21:02

about the history of cat torture in Europe, I didn't

21:04

know anything about the history of cat torture in Europe. I'm

21:07

gonna have to talk about that now for a little while, Jamie.

21:12

Like specific to this region, cat

21:14

torture.

21:14

All of Europe, really, but like, yeah, specifically

21:17

to France. Like the French fucking hate

21:19

cats. Okay, they

21:21

are assholes about cats.

21:24

Yeah, Today we rightly

21:27

revere cats as our moral and intellectual

21:29

superiors, and we've organized our society

21:31

around pleasing them. This is right and good, But cats

21:33

have not always been beloved in the West. Well,

21:36

they are considered basically holy in Islam.

21:38

They're like ritually clean, Like you can have

21:40

them in mosques and stuff all over the place.

21:43

You have to wash your hands after touching them if you're gonna

21:45

go pray. There's a long Christian tradition

21:47

of seeing cats as demonic entities, and

21:50

to be fair, Islam is kind of shitty

21:52

on the subject of dogs. So I guess whatever

21:54

of the big religions you pick, you're gonna be terrible

21:57

to one of the good animals. I don't know why.

22:00

Yeah, it's weird now. In the

22:02

fifteenth century, Edward, Duke of York,

22:04

announced that if the devil inhabited

22:06

any living animal, it was the cat, and

22:09

for centuries all around Europe, good Christians

22:11

tortured and murdered cats for almost no reason.

22:14

In Yepra, Belgium, they held an event called

22:16

Cat and Stoate the Festival of Cats, which

22:19

sounds awesome but actually just involved

22:21

drunken townsfolk throwing cats from the top

22:23

of the church on the hard cobblestones and then lighting

22:25

them on fire.

22:28

Yeah, yep, I hate Okay,

22:30

it's always really frustrating when you hear a story

22:33

about the underclass and it's like you're playing

22:35

to stereotypes about the underclass.

22:37

Yeah on

22:39

the pavement, Yeah yeah, I

22:42

mean I'm gonna be honest. I bet the rich people

22:44

got to go up first and throw the nicest.

22:46

Cats just to set a good yeah.

22:48

And then and then they would privately

22:50

be throwing cats at hard marble floors

22:53

as well.

22:53

Yeah, my god, it's horrible.

22:56

And cat and stoat still takes place

22:58

in Yupra every May, but they use stuffed

23:00

animals now, which just stop, just

23:03

just stop. It's not a good tradition.

23:05

It would be so easy to not do it. It

23:07

would be so easy. Do

23:09

they do Do they eat the cat?

23:11

Like? Do they?

23:12

Or is it just we're just killing the cats?

23:14

Not that that makes a no, No, they're just murdering

23:16

cats for no good reason. Okay, it's

23:18

fun. That is worse and people are horrible, But

23:21

Jamie, you know who doesn't randomly

23:24

torture cats in Belgium? Your

23:26

sponsors exactly

23:28

right now that Sophie vets

23:31

every sponsor to make sure they do not torture

23:33

cats in Belgium.

23:34

Yes, is that that's true? That's is

23:37

a lie, Robert.

23:38

Okay, okay, it is a small country,

23:41

so the vetting's pretty easy. Like

23:43

you'll notice, I did not say, for

23:46

example, Canada. No,

23:49

you certainly did. No, I did

23:51

not.

23:53

Canada just got canceled

23:55

before our very eyes product.

24:06

We're back.

24:08

Yeah.

24:08

Those were good ads, good Jamie,

24:11

good products. After all

24:13

those good ads, are you ready to hear more about

24:15

the systematic torture of cats by generations

24:17

of Europeans.

24:18

I just got a cat, Robert, This is

24:21

not fair.

24:21

I love cats. Oh my god.

24:23

Shout out, Flee, shout out to flee

24:25

my cat.

24:26

He's got a big neck.

24:29

He's got a big neck.

24:31

Free shout out to Roach, one

24:33

of the side characters in uh

24:36

the first version of the movie

24:39

with Keanu Reeves, where some

24:42

of the people are bank robbers but they also

24:44

surfers. Oh oh oh,

24:46

oh, oh oh.

24:47

You're talking about the Keanu Reeves surfing

24:49

movie with with Yes, we've

24:51

covered it on specle cast.

24:53

Yes. Roach. Roach is the one who bleeds

24:55

out in a plane point break. He's

24:57

a good character.

24:58

We're talking we're talking about point break.

25:00

Yes, point break, that's the movie a classic.

25:03

Yes. Now, in France

25:05

there was a centuries old tradition of burning hundreds

25:07

of cats to death and gigantic bonfires. Louis

25:10

the sixteenth even famously lit Paris's

25:12

catfire in sixteen forty eight.

25:15

Uh, the king

25:17

is such a catfire?

25:19

Yeah, of course, who else, Jamie, who

25:21

else?

25:23

This is just all news to me.

25:24

Just I just yes, so news to me

25:26

too. I Okay, I'm.

25:28

Glad that this wasn't like common knowledge. I would

25:30

be horrified if I just didn't. You know, it've been

25:32

burning cats, Okay, I.

25:35

Like it doesn't surprise like obviously, like

25:37

you have to assume earlier times people

25:39

are more callous to

25:41

cats and dogs because them being

25:43

like what they are now is kind of a more recent

25:45

development because we have all these extra resources.

25:48

But I didn't realize it was this like

25:51

cruel.

25:52

This is a lot. Yeah, king

25:55

is sitting the catfire. That's like bad writing.

25:58

Yeah, so the king would Yeah.

26:00

So brulais lechats, which I am

26:02

not going to pronounce more correctly than that, because

26:05

it's a horrible thing. And fuck fuck

26:07

France, as it was called varied

26:10

in a number of different ways. Sometimes it was just massive

26:12

bonfires where living cats were

26:14

tied together in like huge

26:17

pires. Sometimes living cats were

26:19

tied above small fires on like a spit

26:21

and then roasted to death. Sometimes cats

26:23

were set in wooden cages and burnt to death. In

26:26

some towns, people known as quremauds

26:29

cat chasers would soak cats and fuel

26:31

light them on fire and chase them through town to the

26:33

amusement of citizens.

26:34

Peoples are so upset

26:37

all the time.

26:37

I know, right, damn they're

26:40

an oppressed species.

26:42

Yes they are.

26:43

Yeah, I would be pissed.

26:46

We you should be. I'm pissed, I

26:48

am. The charred remains of these tortured cats

26:50

were taken home as good luck charms by people.

26:53

In seventeen thirty, as revolutionary

26:55

sentiment simmered and bubbled throughout French society,

26:57

two Parisian apprentice printers got fed up

26:59

with the masters and abducted their cats. They

27:02

staged a massive public trial, the

27:04

Great Cat Massacre, as it's become known to

27:06

history. Now, this was tied more

27:08

towards issues of class hatred than hatred

27:10

of cats. But the cats wound

27:13

up actually like.

27:15

Escape cats for the whole situation

27:17

exactly, and that's also the worst

27:20

way to die as as a symbol for something

27:23

that has nothing to do with you.

27:25

Yeah, those cats have no understanding of

27:27

class theory.

27:28

It's took at someone and

27:30

then they're like, well, this has something to do with

27:33

Like my opinion on the new Taylor

27:35

Swift record has nothing to do with Jamie.

27:37

But I killed her as to send a message.

27:40

It would be like if one group of aliens

27:43

came to Earth and murdered you for something they

27:45

knew human beings were going to do one hundred years

27:47

in the future, something you're completely incapable

27:49

of understanding or knowing about. Yeah,

27:51

like just yeah, this, like it's just wild.

27:54

But these apprentices felt their masters treated

27:57

the family cats better than their workers, and

28:00

because they couldn't quite you

28:02

know, murder their bosses, they

28:04

got a crowd together and they captured a bunch of rich

28:06

people's cats, and then they put them on trial

28:09

and sentenced them to be hung until

28:11

dead. And they hung just a fuckload of cats

28:13

to death. That is, they made like the owners

28:16

of the cat's watch. It was super fucked up.

28:18

I don't know what to do

28:21

right now.

28:23

Well, Eva, what you can do right

28:25

now is you can get a little bit into the head of a

28:27

sensitive young soul like Maximiani

28:29

Portas, because a lot

28:31

of this stuff was still going on in France. It

28:33

wasn't at its worst, but like cat torture

28:36

and burning was still happening in the countryside.

28:38

And she sees this as a little girl and

28:41

is like, this is part of why she hates

28:43

those like, you know, French revolutionary and I'll

28:45

use a freedom and equality is She's like, well,

28:48

clearly this is all bullshit. Look at what they're doing to

28:50

these animals, Like where's their you

28:52

know, equality and freedom and like like she

28:54

that's kind of like where she comes at this from, right,

28:57

Yeah. Yeah, So

28:59

she's deep sympathetic to animals

29:01

and particularly cats, and basically incapable

29:04

of being sympathetic to human beings. And

29:09

yeah, an interesting story.

29:11

I'm going to be interested in how she galaxy

29:13

brains being sympathetic towards the plight

29:16

of brutally murdered

29:18

cats to becoming a fascist.

29:21

But you know fascist

29:24

common thing for fascists

29:26

to be honestism

29:32

well, you know, not committing cat murders,

29:34

but like hating people because

29:36

of how garbage they are, and thinking fascism

29:39

is the only way to fix it, because people just

29:41

can't be allowed to live on their

29:43

own.

29:44

Okay, I need to I thought you were saying

29:46

cat specific reasons. I'm like, well, this is

29:48

a true education.

29:50

Yeah. Now, Maximiani was very

29:52

good in school. She was a bright student. She read

29:54

and wrote constantly, and her very favorite writer

29:57

was a nineteenth century French poet

30:00

named Charles Leconte Delile. And

30:02

here's how Savitri's biographer describes

30:04

Lacante Delile's work in the book Hitler's

30:06

Priestess, which is really the only decent

30:08

biography of Savitri. Devi quote

30:11

le Comte Delile's own tragic view of the universe.

30:13

His romantic colors were always tinged with somber

30:16

pessimism, strongly appealed to Maximiane.

30:18

He regarded all religious symbols as fragments

30:20

of a divine truth, but the profusion of faiths over

30:22

time convinced him of the relative value and ultimate

30:25

vanity of every doctrine. Beset by a

30:27

sense of cosmic futility, Lecante Delile

30:29

rejected Christianity and evoked the stoical

30:31

heroism of barbarian and exotic peoples.

30:34

In his famous poem Psycho poems

30:36

Barbaras. He was also powerfully

30:38

attracted to Hinduism following the translation

30:40

of its sacred texts in the eighteen forties. Maximiani

30:43

felt a profound sympathy with La Comte Delile's

30:45

view of life's fragility, the vanity

30:47

of existence, and the illusion of the world. His romantic

30:50

poems about the ancient Egyptians, the Scandinavians,

30:52

the Celts and Hindus, their proud paganism

30:55

and heroic action yet final resignation

30:57

in the face of death and oblivion confirmed

30:59

her own version to Christianity and helped

31:01

her form her own fatalistic worldview.

31:04

So Goths didn't exist in

31:06

the early twentieth century, but Maximiani's

31:09

clearly that.

31:10

She is a proto goth It's again,

31:13

it's just like, if there had been a hot topic for

31:15

her to, you know, be

31:18

a lot, a lot could

31:20

have been avoided. Imagine how many hot

31:22

topic employees were saved

31:24

by that.

31:25

Business, Yeah, a lot of

31:27

them. Imagine how many fascists

31:29

we avoided by, for example,

31:31

the existence of Kylo Rin fan fiction there.

31:35

Honestly, honestly, it's

31:38

wow, that actually hit for me.

31:40

Wow, that hit that people. People need an

31:43

outlet, you know, and if you don't, this is

31:45

what happens.

31:46

Right, You're just like, if you can make it horny

31:48

and palatable, you're going to.

31:50

Prevent something bad. This was a a

31:52

young girl who desperately needed to

31:54

be distracted, and nothing distracted

31:57

her. And that, right, it was a problem.

32:00

Laye out a pretty clear track for you to

32:02

really, I mean, I just, yeah, send

32:04

me back in time with a Jack Skellington hoodie

32:06

for this woman.

32:08

Oh my god, that would have solved so many

32:10

problems. I want to create some others.

32:12

I mean, she still would have been a deeply

32:15

annoying person, but like I

32:17

had a Jack Skellington hoodie.

32:19

But also I had never seen the movie. I was a total poser.

32:22

Oh boy, that's going to get

32:24

you canceled harder than anything else today.

32:26

And then I saw the movie and guess what, I didn't

32:28

like it very much.

32:30

I watched it.

32:31

It's fine, it's fine, Well,

32:33

actually I don't. I think it's maybe not so good.

32:36

Beautiful animation though anyways.

32:38

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you get to judge it for its

32:40

time, do

32:44

I. Anyways, it

32:46

was no For example, the Little Toaster,

32:49

I don't know aprils, Yeah,

32:52

yeah, it's

32:54

up. No, no, it didn't fuck

32:57

kids up.

32:58

I loved the pray.

32:59

Little Toaster damaged me forever.

33:01

Really, that's why he But

33:04

he was so brave, Robert, he

33:06

was so brave.

33:07

Movie fucked me.

33:08

That's why you throw bagels, right, Robert, I

33:11

don't know.

33:11

It's why I'm scared of fucking radiators.

33:16

You've got to do some exposure therapy for you

33:19

with a brave little toaster. That's

33:21

why he doesn't toast his bagels. He

33:24

only throws them. That's embarrassing.

33:26

I mean, that's like the thing. Tragic, tragic.

33:30

Imagine the path we could have avoided.

33:32

I know. Maximiani

33:35

Portis was very political as

33:37

a young girl. When World War

33:39

One started in nineteen fourteen, she at

33:41

nine years old, knew very clearly that she

33:44

did not trust the Entente powers, so

33:47

like England, France, you know, Russia. Some

33:49

of this likely came from the fact that Greece's King

33:51

Constantine was very pro German and

33:54

refused to get into the war on the side of either

33:56

the entent or the Central Powers. But

33:59

the King of Greece's Prime minister, a

34:01

guy named Venizelos, which

34:04

I'm probably mispronouncing disagreed

34:06

with the king. He was very pro British and supported

34:08

Greece getting into the war. The two fought

34:10

over this for years until in nineteen sixteen

34:13

a group of pro Venizelos army officers

34:15

staged a coup against the king. There were rumors

34:18

that the Untaunted back this, and those rumors seemed

34:20

credible in light of the fact that French and British

34:22

troops landed in Salonica and Athens

34:24

in nineteen fifteen and sixteen to force

34:27

Greek compliance in their demands from military

34:29

access to the Macedonian Front so they could

34:31

better fight Austria Hungary. That's

34:34

a lot a history there, but basically,

34:36

she's very pro Greece and wants Grecee to stay

34:39

out of the war because she also likes Germany, hates

34:41

the English, hates the French, and she's

34:43

pissed off because England and France

34:45

back this prime minister who

34:47

wants Greece to get into the war, and they also fuck

34:50

with Greek sovereignty and stuff. She gets

34:52

really angry over all.

34:53

And how old is she

34:56

at this point?

34:57

Where are we nine, ten eleven

34:59

years old? The end in nineteen sixteen, when.

35:01

They imagine, did you know what was going

35:03

on in the world when you were nine or ten years old? Like, how

35:05

aware were you?

35:07

I was pretty I mean nine eleven happened

35:09

when I was like twelve, and that was definitely like the

35:11

start of me getting political. I guess, yeah,

35:13

I was in World War One. Yeah,

35:16

you know. World War One's that level of thing, right

35:18

where like even a little kid is kind

35:20

of like, you're going to pay attention to that shit. It's

35:23

kind of a big deal.

35:24

You don't have a fully formed opinion, but you'll

35:26

know what's going on.

35:27

You'll know what's going I guess.

35:29

I'm just like, it would be so bizarre to me if

35:31

someone was like Jamie's beliefs at eight years

35:33

old, was nine to eleven?

35:35

Was school got out early that day?

35:37

And this is where I should note that

35:40

this is going to be an imperfect episode in terms

35:42

of that sort of thing, because our main source

35:44

on this is Hitler's Priestess, which is a

35:46

biography that's fairly decent but

35:49

also flawed because it's mainly based

35:51

on Savitri Devi's own biographical

35:53

writings of her recollections of her own life.

35:56

Like there's just not a lot of information there's

35:58

not a lot of weren't a lot of people to go back to and

36:00

like talk to about her and as a child

36:02

and stuff who were still alive when she

36:05

became relevant. Oh, if I think it was written

36:07

in ninety.

36:07

Eight, if I could write about like

36:10

what I thought I thought

36:12

at eight years old, I'd be like, Jamie was a brilliant

36:15

genius who had opinions on foreign

36:17

policy.

36:17

Okay, got it well. But that said,

36:20

given the I don't think we shouldn't

36:22

discard all of this because if you look

36:24

at the thrust of her life, she does

36:26

live the life of someone who's always been very

36:29

political. I mean, she's sure,

36:32

yeah, exactly, that's a vibe. So yeah,

36:35

Venizelos and his men took over part

36:38

of Greece with the backing of Britain and France,

36:40

and those two countries were happy to recognize his

36:42

government.

36:43

Well.

36:43

They carried out a brutal ten month blockade of the

36:45

Greek provinces that stayed loyal to the king, and

36:48

young Maximiani watched all this as she grew

36:50

into an adolescent girl. Some of her earliest

36:52

memories were news reports of protests from Athens

36:55

of Whyalist crowds railing against the entent

36:57

and Maximiani sided with them and can say

37:00

the Aton's treatment of Greece to be basically criminal.

37:03

Her disgust was reinforced after the war.

37:05

In the wake of the Central powers defeat, the

37:07

Ottoman Empire was broken up and Greece

37:10

was given control in the Versailles Treaty of

37:12

a city called Smyrna now Smyrna

37:14

is a city on the Aegean coast of Anatolia,

37:17

which is modern day Turkey. It was

37:19

the center of a nearly three thousand year

37:21

old Greek community that lived on the coasts

37:23

of Anatolia. Greece, with some justification,

37:26

thought that a lot of Anatolia ought

37:28

to be part of Greece because it was culturally

37:30

and historically Greece and the newly

37:32

created nation of Turkey did not agree.

37:35

So, with the backing of the Versailles Treaty,

37:37

Greece invaded Smyrna in nineteen

37:39

nineteen to make good on the promises that had

37:42

been made to them by the Entente, and the fighting

37:44

was a disaster from the beginning. The Ottoman

37:46

Empire had been defeated in the war technically,

37:48

but on the ground and actual battles. Their soldiers

37:51

had performed pretty well. They'd fought off a big invasion

37:53

at Gallipoli. The birth of the Turkish nation

37:55

after the fall of the Ottoman Empire was met with a swelling

37:57

of nationalist fervor and Anatolia, and

38:00

this helped to spawn a powerful insurgent

38:02

Turkish movement dedicated to defeating the Greek

38:04

invasion. So

38:07

a truce was reached in nineteen twenty, but

38:09

like many recent truces in Turkish military

38:12

history, it was not a real truce, and around

38:14

the same time King Constantine was restored

38:16

to the Greek throne. This turn the remaining

38:18

great powers of Europe against Greece, and even

38:20

though they promised Greece Smyrna and the Versailles

38:22

Treaty in nineteen twenty one, they basically

38:25

like were like fuck that shit and their

38:28

support.

38:29

Do we know where the Greeks at

38:31

this time stood on cats?

38:34

Uh, you know, they're closer to the Middle

38:37

East. So I'm gonna guess more pro cat.

38:39

More pro cat, Okay, Okay, So

38:42

okay, yeah, I think

38:44

that.

38:45

Yeah, the further in that direction, you get

38:47

more pro cat, less pro dog. You

38:49

know, I think that's generally fair so western.

38:52

They've got a lot of dogs, Yeah.

38:56

The dog.

38:58

Maybe they just lit cats and on

39:00

fire. I don't know. I did not do that research.

39:04

Okay, these are the questions I have Robert,

39:06

take em or leave them.

39:08

So the French and Italian governments

39:11

like betray Greece first, and they sign

39:13

agreements with the Turkish leader Mustafa Camal

39:15

and to ignore the promises they'd made in the Verse I

39:17

Treaty to Greece. Britain held out the

39:19

longest, but when Greece launched an offensive

39:22

in Anatolia and March of nineteen twenty one,

39:25

all of the allies suddenly adopted a policy

39:27

of neutrality. Britain banned for their arm sales

39:30

to Greece, well, France was happy to allow

39:32

its weapons makers to sell straight to Turkey.

39:34

The whole effort to incorporate the Greek regions

39:36

of Anatolia into the Greek nation ended

39:38

in disaster and military defeat. In nineteen

39:41

twenty two, Greek forces fled Asia

39:43

Minor, and the Turkish army conducted a campaign

39:45

of extermination and ethnic cleansing on their Aegean

39:48

coast. They massacred some thirty

39:50

thousand Christians, a mix of Greeks, Armenians

39:52

and Franks in order to ensure no Greek

39:55

independence movement would ever crop up on their coast.

39:57

Again. Awesome, the Smyrna debacle.

40:00

Yeah, this is why there's no real Greek

40:02

community in Anatota anymore, not like there

40:04

was for three thousand years prior. This is like what wipes

40:07

out that community. Okay, yeah, so

40:11

you can see why a Greek nationalist

40:13

like Maximiani Portas, who is like fifteen

40:15

sixteen years old then and like really

40:18

actually starting to like understand

40:20

the world, is furious about

40:23

all this, and it breeds in her a powerful

40:25

hatred of the Entente powers,

40:28

particularly of France and of England.

40:32

And she basically felt that like all these fancy words

40:34

they had about liberty and democracy were bullshit

40:36

when they couldn't even hold the basic promises and protect

40:39

the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Greek civilians,

40:41

which is a fair point, very valid.

40:43

Yes, yeah, yeah, Now I'm

40:45

not trying to like ignore the Turkish point of view

40:47

in this too, like Greece is not in the right

40:50

here as a country either, like everybody's in the

40:52

wrong. Although Turkey massacres thirty thousand

40:54

people. So I'm gonna say, maybe they're more in the wrong.

40:57

But this is complicated. Yeah,

40:59

but this this is sort of how Maximiani

41:01

is very much on the side of Greece is fucked

41:03

over. And this is an entirely like

41:06

a crime committed by the Entente

41:08

powers against Greece. Simply it

41:11

sets up the rest of her life in a lot

41:13

of ways. Okay, So

41:16

other influences on her developing mind were

41:19

the sight of French crowds and Lyon cheering

41:21

uproariously at the brutal terms of the Treaty

41:24

of Versailles when they were announced. She was horrified

41:26

when the French government stationed black Synegalese

41:29

troops to occupy the Rure, Germany's industrial

41:31

heartland. Now, this is one of those moves by France

41:34

that engendered a whole shitload of racism in Central

41:36

Europe. It was a big influence on a lot of early

41:38

Nazi thinkers too. And obviously black

41:41

soldiers aren't he worse than white ones. But as civilians

41:43

living under military occupation, you're going to hate

41:45

whatever foreign soldiers occupy your country.

41:48

And if those soldiers are the only black people we've ever

41:50

met, it wasn't a great move on

41:52

France's behalf Jesus

41:54

Christ. Yeah, so

41:58

I'm trying to set up all of like this is like the shit

42:00

that like is forming. She's twelve, thirteen,

42:03

fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, is all this is going on

42:05

like formative fucking years.

42:07

Yeah.

42:07

Yeah. So she hates France,

42:09

she hates England, she hates black people, she

42:12

hates Turkish people. She's she

42:15

loves a lot more hate. She loves

42:17

cats. This is the consistence one.

42:20

Yeah, yeah, Jesus.

42:23

In nineteen twenty three, a freshly

42:25

graduated Maximiani Portos left France

42:27

to attend college in Greece. She was just on

42:29

the edge of eighteen and furious with the status quo

42:31

in Europe, without any real clear idea of

42:34

how she thought things ought to be. Instead, she

42:36

did, however, know that she was obsessed with Hellenism,

42:39

which is like ancient Greek culture.

42:41

She's a dork.

42:43

Yeah, she's a big fucking joy.

42:45

She's like wait, Helen

42:48

of Troy Abstin.

42:49

Oh my god. She would not

42:51

shut up about the elliot.

42:53

She was a fucking you know, I've

42:55

read multiple translations and you're like, can

42:57

you not? OK?

42:59

She has strong and profoundly

43:01

thirsty opinions on Achilles.

43:05

She's like ranked gods and goddesses hot

43:07

to that.

43:09

If she'd seen the actual movie Troy

43:11

that came out like a decade ago, she would have been furious,

43:13

because there's no way Brad Pitt was as hot

43:15

as the Achilles in her mind.

43:19

Beautiful.

43:20

Yeah, she believed

43:22

the old Greeks had been quote a civilization

43:25

of iron, rooted in truth, a civilization

43:27

with all the virtues of the ancient world, none of

43:29

its weaknesses, and all the technical achievements

43:31

of the modern age, with that modern hypocrisy, pettiness,

43:34

and moral squalor. Now this is,

43:36

of course, wildly inaccurate. The

43:38

ancient Greeks were like, unbelievably

43:41

fucked up. They also did a lot of cool shit, obviously,

43:43

like every other ancient bee. That's

43:45

all ancient people do, a lot of cool shit.

43:48

All Aztec's amazing shit, horribly

43:50

fucked up, ancient Romans amazing

43:52

shit, Han Chinese ancient amazing

43:55

shit, horribly for everybody. Yeah, in

43:57

the Greek specific case, they fucked a

43:59

bunch of little kids. They repeatedly put

44:01

narcissistic idiots in charge of their city states.

44:03

They made numerous blunders that ensured their period

44:06

of military and economic might was short lived,

44:08

and they also created some of the most influential

44:10

philosophy in fiction and art that has

44:12

ever been made in the history of the human race.

44:15

Complicated people, Maximiani

44:18

does not get a complex picture of ancient Greece.

44:20

It's just the good shit. Yeah, yeah,

44:24

good lord, you

44:26

might say, like, I don't know, I want

44:28

to say, her understanding of Greek history was not deep.

44:30

It was certainly incomplete. That

44:33

said pretty much only like,

44:35

the only thing Europeans would write about the ancient Greeks

44:37

in that period was wildly positive. You weren't going

44:40

to get like critical like

44:42

commentary on, for example, Pederasti

44:45

and ancient Greece in fucking nineteen

44:48

twenty, Like, you're just not going to read that.

44:52

Yeah, So, her love of Greece

44:54

was mostly focused on obsessing over their incredible

44:56

art and fantasizing about the idealized

44:59

culture that she eve it existed.

45:00

There, right.

45:01

I mean this, I mean we as children all

45:03

read revisionist history about horrifying

45:06

cultures.

45:07

I was obsessed with ancient Rome for

45:09

a lot of the same reasons.

45:11

Of course, because you were just like, oh, it seems like

45:13

they only to dope stuff and more cool outfits.

45:15

Well, I will say I was kind of a fucked

45:18

up kid, so when I learned about like all of the fucking

45:20

crucifixions and shit, I was kind of like, hell,

45:22

yeah, you're so metal.

45:25

I mean it is

45:27

pretty fucking metal.

45:28

You're so fucking metal.

45:30

We'll talk about what they did to Spartacus and his friends

45:32

one of these days, but it's fucking one

45:35

of like the biggest mic drop moments

45:37

in the history of torturing people to death with wood.

45:40

I think that's fair to say.

45:42

Thrilled to have such a hyper specific.

45:48

So she moves to Greece.

45:50

She's super happy for a while. Obviously best

45:53

place in the world for this girl is fucking Grece at

45:55

this point in time, and the time

45:57

she spent discovering the wonders of Athens,

46:00

which rules coincided

46:02

with some very important goings on in Germany.

46:04

And I'm going to quote again from the book Hitler's Priestess.

46:07

Well years later she would

46:09

recall that she spent such a sunlit afternoon

46:11

upon the Acropolis on ninth October nineteen

46:13

twenty three, the fateful day of Hitler's push

46:15

when he and his followers had attempted a coup against

46:18

the Bavarian government and staged a march

46:20

to the Feldehernhall in the center of Munich.

46:23

The police successfully broke up the march, and sixteen

46:25

martyrs of the early Nazi movement fell beneath

46:27

the hail of bullets. When details of the incident

46:29

were published in the world press the following day,

46:32

there was some discussion over lunch at the International

46:34

Home Hostel, which is where she was crashing at

46:36

the time. Maximiani admits that she did

46:38

not yet connect Hitler with her own dream of a new

46:41

racial order based on her view of classical Greek

46:43

antiquity. However, she strongly sympathized

46:45

with him as an enemy of the Allies on

46:47

account of his contempt for the Versailles Treaty, and

46:50

saw a parallel between his nationalist idea

46:52

of one state for all Germans and the Megali

46:54

idea among the Greeks, which is the idea that Greece

46:57

should recoup its ancient power

46:59

and takeo for the places that had controlled back

47:01

in the day. Argument

47:04

Yeah, she engaged in a heated argument

47:07

in defensive Hitler with the French managers

47:09

of the hostel, So arguing

47:12

about Hitler with a hostel, No, we

47:14

lost her, she's been gone for a while.

47:17

Yeah, but you know who

47:20

won't argue in support of Hitler with the French

47:22

hostel owner in Athens, Robert

47:25

the products and services support this podcasts.

47:28

And services would never ever heard

47:30

us or do something wrong. I've been saying it for years.

47:33

I have agreed for years.

47:35

Fingers crossed for a dig pill ad right after a

47:38

Yeah, what a great transition, both of you. Just

47:41

wonderful work.

47:49

We're back. So it was during

47:51

this first visit to Greece that Maximiani Portos

47:53

would have seen the symbol for the first time

47:55

that would come to define her life and legacy.

47:58

I am talking, of course, about the swastika.

48:01

Odds are good she would have encountered it for the first

48:04

time in the National Museum of Athens,

48:06

which hosted a huge amount of what were believed

48:08

to be Trojan artifacts, which had been

48:10

uncovered by the pioneering and controversial

48:12

archaeologist Heinrich Schleimann. Now,

48:16

Schleimann was not a professional archaeologist,

48:18

which is not weird for the time. Most of like the archaeologists

48:20

of this period are like gentlemen adventurers who

48:23

I mean get our nerds.

48:25

Basically the people in the people in

48:27

like the Mummy movies who are just wearing

48:29

chakeys exact money, and people in

48:31

Tarzan.

48:33

That was the most accurate thing about the Mummy

48:36

movie other than the way mummies react to shotguns.

48:39

They're all named Clayton. Yeah.

48:41

Yeah, so Shleimann Yeah.

48:45

Throughout the mid eighteen hundreds had been a very successful

48:47

German arms merchant, trading raw

48:49

materials for the ingredients to make ammunition, and

48:52

he'd nursed a deep obsession with the iliat his entire

48:54

life. In his late middle age, he decided

48:56

to take his fortune to the Aegean and try to uncover

48:59

the true locate of the ancient city of Troy.

49:02

Unlike pretty much any like traditional

49:04

archaeologist, Shlemann used the Iliad

49:07

as a guide. He thought this book was like basically

49:09

essentially accurate, and he

49:11

followed the poem as if it had been a work of serious

49:13

historical scholarship, and shockingly

49:16

enough, this kind of worked. In eighteen

49:18

seventy one, after three years of searching, Shlemann

49:20

found what was very likely to have been the site

49:23

of ancient Troy. His methods of

49:25

digging it up were brutal. He used crowbars

49:27

and battering rams and destroyed countless thousands

49:30

of artifacts, including ironically,

49:32

what a lot of archaeologists now believe

49:34

was the actual physical evidence of Troy. He

49:36

dug too far down, basically because he

49:39

fucked up and probably destroyed

49:41

what actual Trojan relics there were. But

49:43

he does find what a lot of people think

49:46

was the site of Troy. It's just other shit was built

49:48

there, and he dug up the wrong shit anyway, fucked

49:50

up, Yes, yes,

49:53

So his research

49:56

or his digging, despite all the shit it destroyed, produced

49:58

hundreds upon hundreds upon hun of artifacts

50:01

which people at the time believed to be

50:03

Trojan and many of those artifacts,

50:05

more than eighteen hundred of them, were

50:07

emblazoned with various types of swastika.

50:10

And I'm going to quote next from Scientific

50:12

American. He would go on

50:15

to see the swastika everywhere from Tibet to

50:17

Paraguay to the Gold Coast of Africa, and

50:19

as Schleiman's exploits grew more famous and archaeological

50:22

discoveries became a way of creating a narrative of

50:24

national identity, the swastika grew

50:26

more prominent. It exploded in popularity

50:28

as a symbol of good fortune, appearing on Coca

50:31

Cola products, boy Scouts and Girls club

50:33

materials, and even American military uniforms.

50:36

The Antiquities on Earths by doctor Schleiman at Troy

50:38

Acquire for us a double interest, wrote British

50:40

linguist Archibald Sais in eighteen ninety

50:43

six. They carry us back to the later stone

50:45

ages of the Aryan race.

50:48

Oh dear on

50:51

Coca Cola products, Robert,

50:54

what if that was just a product or serviced advertised?

50:58

But it wasn't a naz It's like I I spent

51:00

some time living in Indias and it's fucking their's swastikas

51:02

all over the dam and it is weird. It takes you

51:05

never really get used to it because of like what it

51:07

means to the West. It's always like

51:10

there's so many swastikas around here.

51:12

That is I mean, even that is fascinating to like

51:14

track the history of a symbol

51:16

and like how it affects different areas

51:19

of the world differently.

51:20

That sounds extremely jarring.

51:22

I actually I have some like tapestries

51:25

that I picked up in India that have little swastikas

51:27

on them in parts, and it's one of those things where it's

51:29

like every now and then, like they're

51:31

not the same as the Nazi swastikas, but they're close

51:34

enough that people will be like, what's up.

51:35

No, I

51:38

need to leave your home right now?

51:40

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're like most

51:43

people.

51:43

Swasticas are pretty small. Most people aren'tetting

51:46

enough the.

51:46

Blanket Nazi Nazi

51:48

swastikas.

51:49

See if I was over your house

51:52

and you said that, I would be like, I actually,

51:55

my uber is here, you know, like if you're

51:57

like, they're not nasty swas Nazi swastikas,

51:59

so calm down.

52:02

Yeah, it's like that.

52:03

Uh, and they offer me a Miller lt. They're

52:08

not Nazis. Would you like a Miller light?

52:11

No, exactly, No, my standard

52:13

greeting people.

52:15

Yeah, that's how you greet all your guests.

52:18

That's specifically how I say to hello to

52:20

the officers who pull me over for speeding.

52:23

No, no, I would be interestedd

52:25

I.

52:26

I know I've gone down that Wikipedia hole

52:28

at one point of just like tracking the symbology,

52:31

the symbology of the it's

52:33

it goes back.

52:34

So Shleman. There's criticism of

52:36

Sleman honestly for his methods. But he's not in any

52:38

way a Nazi, Like, he's just a guy who finds

52:40

a bunch of swastika is buried underground, and

52:43

he's just an.

52:43

Unqualified archaeologist using

52:46

his money in a weird way.

52:48

He's he's very controversial. Still, there

52:50

are aspects of what he did that a lot of people praise

52:52

because he he got a lot of shit right, but he

52:54

also destroyed a huge amount of cultural

52:56

antiquities. He's an interesting person. You should read

52:58

about Shlemans in archaeology.

53:01

Okay, yeah, yeah, I

53:03

mean it.

53:03

Seems like a lot of those gentlemen explorers

53:06

really delighted and you know, like

53:09

destroying and selling off pieces of

53:11

ancient history that had nothing to do with them.

53:14

All of them are problematic. Yeah,

53:18

I will say Schleiman is

53:20

one who comes from like a purer place

53:22

of just being really into

53:25

this history. But

53:28

yeah, you know they're all problematic, so hashtig

53:31

problem. Yeah. Now,

53:34

the swastikas he found increasingly

53:37

all over the world played directly into a shared

53:39

delusion that was spreading like a disease

53:41

among many of the eras white people. The

53:43

myth of the ancient Aryan. Now,

53:46

in actual historical terms, Aryan is

53:48

a term used to refer to the Indo Aryan

53:51

language group. It was never a racial

53:53

classification. The term started

53:55

being used because early linguists noticed strange

53:57

similarities between languages like

54:00

German, Romani, Punjabi, Hindu,

54:02

Urdu in Sanskrit. Well, the term Aryan

54:04

was initially applied to speakers of various

54:07

Indo Iranian languages. The understanding

54:09

of the word became corrupted in the late eighteen hundreds.

54:12

This occurred along the same time that colonialism

54:14

started to reach its absolute zenith, and there were a

54:16

lot of white folks looking for reasons to justify

54:19

the fact that they were basically plundering and

54:21

enslaving the entire world. There were

54:23

also a lot of white folks looking at their increasingly

54:26

multi racial societies, which at that point,

54:29

like meant Italians and Slavs breed with

54:31

Germans and British people, and were getting concerned

54:33

about this fact. And I'm going to

54:35

refer back to Smithsonian Magazine again

54:37

quote. The rising interest in eugenics

54:39

and rachel hygiene, however, led to some to corrupt

54:42

Aryan into a descriptor for an ancient master

54:44

racial identity with a clear through line to contemporary

54:47

Germany. As The Washington Post reported

54:49

in a story about the rise of Nazism several years

54:51

before the start of World War two, Arianism

54:54

was an intellectual dispute between bewhiskered

54:56

scholars as to the existence of a pure and undefiled

54:59

Aryan race at one time stage of Earth's history.

55:01

In the nineteenth century, French aristocrat Arthur

55:04

de Gobinho and others made the connection

55:06

between the mythical Aryans and the Germans, who

55:08

are the superior descendants of the early people,

55:10

now destined to lead the world to greater advancement

55:12

by conquering their neighbors. The findings of

55:14

Schleiman's dig in Turkey then suddenly had a deeper

55:17

ideological meaning. For the nationalists.

55:19

The purely Aryan symbol Shleiman uncovered

55:22

was no longer an archaeological mystery. It

55:24

was a stand in for their superiority. German

55:26

nationalist groups like the reich Schammerbund, a

55:28

nineteen twelve anti Semitic group, and the Bavarian

55:31

Freikorp paramilitary basically the proud

55:33

Boys of the era, used the swastika

55:35

to reflect their newly discovered identity.

55:37

As the master race. Now,

55:40

the reality is that swastikas appeared

55:42

damn near everywhere in human history. It's a common

55:44

design and a striking one, and a bunch of different groups

55:47

of people have independently figured it out over

55:49

time.

55:49

And people should stop talking to you about your blanket

55:51

and actually just relax.

55:52

They're pretty small.

55:55

Nowadays. The swastika is the

55:57

swastika, like it's the Nazi thing

56:00

unless you're in India, because

56:02

the world's big. But back

56:05

in these days, like if you're looking at like ancient history,

56:07

it's best to kind of look at the swastika the humor that weird

56:09

s doodle we all put on our trapper keepers back

56:12

in the nineties, Like no

56:14

one invented that. It just showed up everywhere.

56:16

That's the fucking swastika in prehistory.

56:19

It's just all over the damn place. But of

56:21

course, yeah, uh oh,

56:24

I have that blanket. It

56:28

was not seen as this though by

56:30

a lot of people, and anthropologist Gwendoline

56:32

Lake notes quote when Heinrich Schlimann

56:35

discovered swastikaike decorations on pottery,

56:37

flagments and all archaeological levels at Troy,

56:39

it was seen as evidence for a racial continuity

56:42

and proof that the inhabitants of the site had been Aryan

56:44

all along. The link between the swastika

56:46

and Indo European origin, once forged,

56:49

was impossible to discard. It allowed

56:51

the projection of nationalist feelings and associations

56:53

onto a universal symbol, which hint

56:56

served as a distinguishing boundary marker between

56:58

non Aryan, or rather not German

57:00

and German identity.

57:02

That's fascinating that, I mean,

57:05

because you can understand the logic,

57:07

but it also is kind of absurd to assume

57:10

that, like, oh, this symbol is always surely

57:12

must mean the exact same thing thousands

57:15

of years ago as it does to me today

57:17

now.

57:19

The people then were as dumb as the people

57:21

who planted the Iowa Caucuses. Wow,

57:25

that's why all this happened.

57:26

Robert, my dog worked on the Shadow

57:29

app so really wash your mouth.

57:32

That is sunny.

57:35

Sony invested in the Shadow app.

57:37

I have to say it this

57:39

all this math adds up.

57:41

Yeah, I mean, of course he kept he was talking about

57:43

shadow app for and I'm like, that can't be

57:46

real, and then probably thought.

57:47

It was the dog from uh uh, what

57:50

was that movie with the dogs and cat that

57:52

talk and they find their family terrible.

57:56

I don't know a good movie Homeward Bound, Homeward.

57:58

Oh, I haven't seen Home found Sonny

58:01

definitely just wanted to

58:03

harm people, and he wanted to harm the discourse,

58:05

and that's why he invested in shadow app That's

58:08

fair.

58:08

That's fair. You could call him the Hitler

58:11

of the Iowa caucases, which a

58:13

lot of people.

58:15

Many have, but it makes me uncomfortable.

58:19

Sitting in Athens, reading the news of Hitler's

58:22

movement in Germany and staring at ancient

58:24

swastikas on beloved Greek artifacts,

58:26

things started to come together in Maximiani

58:28

Portos's mind. She moved to Greece

58:30

permanently in nineteen twenty eight, after finishing

58:32

college and renouncing her French citizenship.

58:35

The very next year, nineteen twenty nine, she went

58:37

with her mother and aunt on a trip to the Holy Land

58:40

that wound up having just as deep an impact

58:42

on her developing mind as the swastika. Now,

58:45

Maximiani had never been very religious. Her mother

58:47

and aunt were, though, and while they failed to inculcate

58:49

a love of Christ in Maximiani, they

58:51

did succeed in making her hate Jewish people,

58:55

which is not the part of Christianity to transfer

58:58

if you're gonna pick one all.

59:00

I mean, there's so.

59:01

Many different horrible things to take away from

59:03

Christianity, and that is.

59:06

That is the worst of all.

59:07

Yeah.

59:08

Yeah, she got none of the good stuff,

59:11

just the anti Semitism. Uh okay,

59:14

yeah, yeah, it's

59:17

not great.

59:17

It's not great. I'm starting to think this lady

59:19

maybe not so nice.

59:22

Not heading in a great direction. Yeah. Now,

59:24

a lot of this was tied to the fact that Maximiani

59:27

was so in love with Greek culture and

59:30

she was really pissed off because she

59:32

was like particularly in love with like ancient Greek pagan culture,

59:35

like the old Greek gods and their myths and

59:37

stuff, and none of that stuff was very relevant

59:39

other than it's like an academic thing by this

59:41

point in history, and Christianity

59:44

and Judaism were obviously hugely relevant in Europe,

59:46

and she hated this, and she blamed

59:48

the Jews for the fact that nobody other

59:50

people weren't as into Greek history as

59:53

she was, Like this is like the core of it for

59:55

her. It was like she's in love with like Zeus

59:57

and shit, and she's like, why don't people like

59:59

this as much I do. It's the Jews.

1:00:01

She's become a chaos nerd.

1:00:04

No, it's

1:00:06

not great.

1:00:07

Yeah, that's really bad.

1:00:10

So her trip to the Holy Land with her mom and aunt

1:00:12

was a bit of a weird one. No, okay,

1:00:15

I mean yeah. She

1:00:18

was revolted by the obeisance they played to Judeo

1:00:20

Christian holy sites, and as she touristed her

1:00:22

way through old Jerusalem, she felt, in her biographer's

1:00:25

words, overwhelmed and repelled by

1:00:27

the exotic nature of the Jews.

1:00:29

They're attired, they're customs, observances

1:00:32

and festivals. The strange dark

1:00:34

men in broad brimmed hats and blong black

1:00:36

coats hastening to prayers at the Wailing

1:00:38

Wall. Okay, it's

1:00:42

interesting that Goodwin

1:00:44

Clark Portis's biographer mentions

1:00:46

this specifically, seeing these Jewish people and being

1:00:48

like horrified by the way they look in their coats

1:00:51

and hair locks and long black coats.

1:00:53

It's possible that precise moment never happened,

1:00:56

but it's worth noting that this moment

1:00:58

bears a striking resemblance to a tale

1:01:00

Adolf Hitler told regularly about

1:01:02

the supposed moment that he specifically gained

1:01:05

his hatred of Jewish people. And here's

1:01:07

how he wrote about that moment in Mine comp. This

1:01:10

takes place in Lintz, No, sorry, in Austria,

1:01:13

maybe his boy Vienna.

1:01:16

Once, as I was strolling through the inner city, I

1:01:18

suddenly encountered an apparition in a black

1:01:20

caftan and black hair locks. Is this a jew

1:01:23

was my first thought, for to be sure

1:01:25

they had not looked like that in Linz, where he grew

1:01:27

up. I observed the man furtively and cautiously.

1:01:30

But the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing

1:01:33

feature for feature, the more my first question

1:01:35

assumed a new form. Is this a German?

1:01:38

So this is like a huge moment in like Hitler

1:01:40

lore. It's possible that the reason

1:01:43

that Portis writes her

1:01:45

own thing, like her own story this

1:01:47

way is that she's hearkening to mine comp,

1:01:50

because again she writes about this later. It's

1:01:52

also possible they just were similar people and

1:01:54

had a similar Momentpholks.

1:01:56

If she's the primary resource for herself

1:02:00

and seems to have like a fair grasp on storytelling,

1:02:02

it makes sense that.

1:02:03

She would pull It doesn't make sense she's

1:02:05

like, oh, this is.

1:02:06

The end of act one, where's my

1:02:08

inciting she needs she wrote her own inciting

1:02:10

incident.

1:02:11

If it didn't, yeah, I'll

1:02:13

take a leaf out of you know. It's like, uh,

1:02:16

you know, George Lucas stole

1:02:19

from from great Japanese cinema to

1:02:21

make Star Wars, and in a very

1:02:24

similar fashion, Savitri DEVII stole

1:02:26

from Adolf Hitler the

1:02:29

causawa of.

1:02:29

Not tr true artists Steel Robert.

1:02:32

It's what they it's what they

1:02:34

open saying for generations. Yeah,

1:02:37

that is funny.

1:02:37

I mean I feel like that same logic of like

1:02:40

you have to have a story to go with your

1:02:42

hatred. They have that same logic

1:02:45

on like Iron Chef, you

1:02:47

know, like they be like, there has to be a story

1:02:50

that goes with this dish.

1:02:51

And sometimes you're like, sometimes it just is.

1:02:54

She just cooked some fucking food, asshole. Sometimes

1:02:56

you just make some food and it's bad and

1:02:59

it's terrible.

1:03:00

Yeah.

1:03:00

So Maximiani

1:03:03

would go on to claim that after this visit

1:03:05

to the Holy Land, she decided

1:03:07

that Hitler's campaign of hate against Jewish people

1:03:10

was not just a matter of German concern,

1:03:12

it was an international crusade.

1:03:15

She came to believe that all of the formerly pagan nations

1:03:17

of Europe had to throw off their Judaeo Christian

1:03:20

heritage and like reconnect with their

1:03:22

pagan roots. And this

1:03:25

is the first time she realizes that

1:03:27

she's a national socialist, and she the way

1:03:29

she described that, she realizes she's always been

1:03:31

a national socialist. And so she falls

1:03:34

fully in love with Hitler at this point.

1:03:38

And she's not a

1:03:40

German Nazi though, And initially

1:03:42

the way she decides to act on

1:03:45

this newfound Nazism is

1:03:47

to basically try to revive Greek

1:03:49

nationalism and pagan beliefs, kind

1:03:52

of with the structure of national socialism

1:03:54

over them. And so she returns to Athens

1:03:56

and she sets to work trying to cobble together her own

1:03:59

Greek version of Nazism, but focused

1:04:01

around a religious component that involved a return

1:04:03

to worshiping the ancient Greek pantheon.

1:04:05

I mean always with this woman.

1:04:08

Yeah. Now, by this

1:04:10

point, the ancient Greeks had become sort of the

1:04:12

Uberminsch in her own mind, and this conception

1:04:15

was nursed by the bits of Hitler speeches that made

1:04:17

their way over into the press in her part of the world.

1:04:19

By nineteen thirty, she finally read mind

1:04:22

Camp for the very first time, which introduced

1:04:24

Maximiani to Hitler's theories about the Aryan

1:04:26

race. His ideas about the superior

1:04:28

race consistently undermined by the evil

1:04:31

Jews jailed remarkably well with

1:04:33

Maximiani's own beliefs about the ancient

1:04:35

Greeks and the Jews. She became increasingly

1:04:38

obsessed with the Arians, and in part the idea

1:04:40

of seeking out the remaining evidence of

1:04:42

their existence. And at

1:04:44

the time, it was generally understood that India

1:04:47

had been conquered and ruled by the Aryans. Many

1:04:49

among the weirder Nazi sets saw Hinduism

1:04:52

as an example of a pure Ariyan pagan

1:04:54

tradition uncorrupted by Judaism. They

1:04:56

found the Hindu cast system deeply intriguing

1:04:59

as well, for reasons that should be obvious, and

1:05:01

enshrining a small number of superior beings

1:05:03

and power over a vast number of less valuable

1:05:05

individuals. In nineteen thirty

1:05:08

two, Maximiani's father died and

1:05:10

she decided to take this as an opportunity to travel

1:05:12

to India to seek out the truth of the ancient Arians.

1:05:15

It's like a Nazi version of Eat, Pray, Love.

1:05:19

Yeah, this is in another

1:05:21

world. This is a very cute movie, and she just

1:05:24

took every the same from

1:05:26

it. It's you remember that horrible

1:05:28

Cameron Crow movie Elizabethtown or

1:05:30

Orlando Blue Drivers as the Country with.

1:05:32

His Dad's ashes, and is like, I'm glad

1:05:35

we had this talk. And You're like, what the fuck are

1:05:37

you?

1:05:37

It sounds like forty different movies, Jamie,

1:05:40

It's no, it's the same.

1:05:41

It's the same. Oh my elizabeth

1:05:44

townheads Well, no, it's the same. Paula

1:05:47

Deane's in that movie.

1:05:49

Cursed, Oh God, speaking

1:05:52

of Nazis. Now.

1:05:56

So Savitri decides she's gonna go to fucking India,

1:05:58

and she's not the only person this idea of going to

1:06:01

India to seek out the Arians. In fact, in nineteen

1:06:03

thirty five, Heinrich Himmler's SS founded

1:06:05

the annan Nerby, a scientific think

1:06:07

tank dedicated to finding evidence of the ancient Arians,

1:06:10

and they actually sent multiple expeditions into

1:06:12

India and Tibet. Maximiani

1:06:15

went to India to find evidence of the Arians too, but

1:06:17

she also went there to see firsthand

1:06:19

evidence of a civilization founded upon

1:06:21

what she believed was a natural racial hierarchy.

1:06:24

She felt that Indian society looked how the

1:06:26

world would appear in the year eight thousand,

1:06:29

after six thousand years of Nazi rule,

1:06:32

very specifically then eight thousand.

1:06:34

The Jonahs Brothers didn't even think that far,

1:06:37

you know.

1:06:38

But they're huge, The Nazi Jokers

1:06:40

brothers are.

1:06:41

Huge in the year never shut up enjoying this moment

1:06:43

that.

1:06:45

I do not get that joke.

1:06:46

The Jonahs brothers first single

1:06:48

in two thousand and six or maybe seven

1:06:51

was a song called year three thousand.

1:06:54

They said, not much has changed, but we live

1:06:56

underwater. That's all they knew about.

1:06:59

That's a lot of change, Jamie.

1:07:01

Well, they say.

1:07:03

That not much has changed a

1:07:06

thousand, not much has changed.

1:07:08

I've been.

1:07:13

Also live under water.

1:07:15

It's a weird it makes no sense.

1:07:17

Okay, sorry, Robert continued your podcast.

1:07:20

But she's thinking that a year eight thousand,

1:07:23

eight thousand, think even Kevin

1:07:25

John she already has.

1:07:27

You have to give her credit. She is eight

1:07:29

times as ambitious as Hitler.

1:07:33

God.

1:07:34

Yeah.

1:07:36

So upon her arrival in the country, her beliefs

1:07:38

were seemingly confirmed when she watched a parade

1:07:41

celebrating Rama, a deified Aryan

1:07:43

hero. The parade featured huge numbers

1:07:45

of dark skinned Indians bowing and worshiping

1:07:48

a lighter skinned statue of Rama, and

1:07:50

Rama is most assuredly not white,

1:07:53

although he is often depicted as lighter skinned,

1:07:55

but he is definitely Indian. But

1:07:59

it was not uncommon for Europeans who were attracted

1:08:01

to India in this period to decide

1:08:03

that a number of ancient Hindu heroes and gods

1:08:06

were in fact white. This

1:08:08

was like a common thing, and in fact, Maximiani's

1:08:11

favorite poet who we talked about earlier, Lecante Delisle,

1:08:13

had actually written a poem about Rama that referred

1:08:16

to him as Thou whose blood is pure,

1:08:18

Thou whose body is white, and a

1:08:21

subduer of all the profane races.

1:08:23

So, yeah, everyone's

1:08:26

a little bit of a Nazi in colonialism.

1:08:29

That's kind of the deal.

1:08:31

That's kind of their thing. It's kind of I mean,

1:08:34

yeah, not shocking.

1:08:35

And if you're interested in the story

1:08:37

of Rama. One thing I would recommend that's super

1:08:39

accessible. There's a movie online by Nina

1:08:42

Paley, who's a female graphic artist who's

1:08:44

amazing, called Sida Sings the Blues. If

1:08:46

you just google that, it's the whole movie's free. It's

1:08:49

one of those beautiful pieces of animation. It's why

1:08:51

I went to Indian in the first places. An incredible movie.

1:08:53

Oh wow.

1:08:54

And one of the things that does really well

1:08:56

is it has all these scenes where like individual

1:08:59

like myths from like Hindu

1:09:01

mythology are explained by like groups

1:09:04

of people arguing about them, which if you actually

1:09:06

go to India, is how you learn about

1:09:08

myths. Like if you talk about the myth of Sida and Rama

1:09:11

to like a family, everyone in the

1:09:13

family, you like get like multiple different versions

1:09:15

of the story, and people will argue with each other. Like

1:09:17

it's not like Christian orthodoxy or

1:09:19

whatever. Like it's very very

1:09:22

complicated stuff, but fascinating.

1:09:25

So yeah. Maximiani

1:09:28

is convinced that this guy's white, though, and

1:09:30

she falls in love with India and

1:09:32

eventually finds her way to an ashram in

1:09:35

Bengal, where she's able to live cheap

1:09:37

and learn Hindu and study Hindu religious traditions.

1:09:40

She gets a job outside of Delhi teaching English

1:09:42

and Indian history, and she grew more and

1:09:44

more taken with Hinduism, until in nineteen

1:09:46

thirty six, she adopted a Hindu name,

1:09:49

Savitri Devi, taken from a

1:09:51

Hindu solar goddess. This woman

1:09:53

is obsessed with some gods and

1:09:55

goddess.

1:09:56

Loves gods and goddess is so much. She's

1:09:58

such a dork.

1:10:00

Yeah, it's specifically sun gods

1:10:02

and goddess is. She's fucking obsessed with Aknaton

1:10:04

too. It's weird.

1:10:05

There was a girl in my middle school who was like, call

1:10:08

me Artemis and we're like, no, okay,

1:10:10

no, no, we did, we did, and

1:10:13

our and if. I was also a dork,

1:10:15

but not that kind of dork god, No,

1:10:18

no, no, I was just a normal, white, bright

1:10:20

eyes loving dork.

1:10:22

I'm a big believer in calling people

1:10:24

by whatever name they prefer to be referred

1:10:26

to, unless it's the name of a god or goddess.

1:10:29

Then I just start I

1:10:31

just get furious. Yeah, I'm

1:10:34

not gonna I'm not gonna push that behavior.

1:10:36

Well, she was. She was Artemis for all of eighth grade,

1:10:38

and then she went back to uh, just

1:10:40

just Alex for the rest of as far

1:10:42

as I know her life.

1:10:44

That's fine. Yeah, yeah, any

1:10:46

other name really now. Early

1:10:49

on in her time in India, Savitri had hiked to

1:10:51

the top of a hill and seen a beautiful Indian

1:10:53

fortress, one of many such colossal ancient

1:10:55

relics that dot the country. She was taken

1:10:58

by its beauty and equally horrified by

1:11:00

a more modern Jesuit hospital that had been

1:11:02

constructed nearby. This was powerfully

1:11:04

symbolic to her, and she claimed that it cemented

1:11:06

in her a deep need to protect Hindu India

1:11:09

from being infected by Judeo Christian

1:11:11

taint. Starting in nineteen thirty

1:11:13

seven, she began working as an anti Christian

1:11:15

preacher for Swami Satyananda's Hindu

1:11:18

Mission in Calcutta. For two years, she criss

1:11:20

crossed the country, meeting with various tribal

1:11:22

elders and arranging public debates with Christian

1:11:24

missionaries. And I'd like to quote now from

1:11:26

an article by Conrad Elst, an indiologist

1:11:29

who's analyzed this history. Quote.

1:11:32

Thoroughly familiar with the mentality and methods of

1:11:34

her adversary, she could destroy the credit of the

1:11:36

imported religion in the minds of the villagers and

1:11:38

prevent or undo many conversions. There

1:11:40

was a sharp contradiction between her own racist

1:11:43

and anti egalitarian convictions and the reformist

1:11:45

in a galitarian program of the Hindu Mission.

1:11:47

To the Hindu Mission, Hinduism was a value

1:11:50

in itself to Savitri Devi. It was

1:11:52

but an instrument of her imagined Aryan race.

1:11:54

In her years as a preacher, she kept

1:11:56

her non Hindu preoccupations to herself, but

1:11:58

in her memoirs she declared

1:12:01

that she conceived of her reconversion mission

1:12:03

as an exercise and deception from

1:12:05

the racist Aryan viewpoint, it was necessary

1:12:08

to give the most backward and degenerate aborigines

1:12:10

a false Hindu consciousness, she wrote.

1:12:13

This is one of the major areas where you'll run into disputes

1:12:16

about Savitri Devi. The common view on her legacy

1:12:18

is spoiler that she proposed

1:12:20

a synthesis between Hinduism and Nazism,

1:12:23

and aspects of this are true, but it

1:12:25

would be more accurate to say that she found Hinduism

1:12:28

a useful tool for advancing Nazism.

1:12:31

And I'm going to quote again from Else's essay. In

1:12:34

contrast with the Hindu nationalists, but in tune

1:12:36

with Indian Marxists and Castists, she

1:12:38

believed that the concept nation and a program

1:12:40

of nationalism could not apply to India. In

1:12:43

nineteen thirty eight, she used the slogan make every

1:12:45

Hindu and Indian nationalist, and every Indian

1:12:47

nationalist to Hindu. Now this seems

1:12:49

to be something not legitimately, Yeah,

1:12:52

and she didn't really believe it. In

1:12:54

her autobiography years later, she expressed

1:12:56

the belief that nationalism could only exist within

1:12:58

members of the same race, thought that all the

1:13:00

different casts in India were different races. And

1:13:03

we're getting into the weeds here too much. But

1:13:05

it's important to understand for what comes

1:13:08

next that Saviitri Devi advocated for Hindu

1:13:10

nationalism, but not because she believed

1:13:12

strongly in it. Because she saw it as a useful

1:13:15

tool for harming the British Empire and advancing

1:13:17

Nazism. Okay, it's her main goal.

1:13:19

So she's merely co opting it for her own

1:13:22

sinister purposes.

1:13:23

It's a little more complicated than that because

1:13:25

she also loves it, like she's She's takes

1:13:28

on a lot of Hindu beliefs. It's this is a weird

1:13:31

story and there's no like super simple

1:13:33

answer to it. But it's not as simple

1:13:35

as she just becomes Hindu and also

1:13:37

Nazi. Like it's weirder than that too.

1:13:44

No one edited this out. I need people

1:13:47

to know what what I've been

1:13:49

forced to endure. You just like literally

1:13:52

did that into the microphone.

1:13:53

Literally it was hard.

1:13:54

I had to I'm sorry.

1:13:56

I can see Robert right now, and he wiped

1:13:58

his nose on the mic and he was like,

1:14:00

linked it and then licked

1:14:03

it.

1:14:04

You licked Robert Evan, You licked

1:14:06

it.

1:14:06

All of this gets edited out now.

1:14:11

Many Hindu nationalists were very bullish

1:14:13

about the Nazis because Great Britain owned

1:14:16

India and ruled it as a brutal colonial

1:14:18

oppressor, and they figured, you know, the enemy

1:14:20

of my enemy, right. Not

1:14:22

all of them felt this way. There were a lot of Hindu nationalists

1:14:25

who were against the Nazis because they were like, well,

1:14:27

but they're Nazis, so

1:14:29

again, I can't paint everybody with the same brush. Yeah,

1:14:33

but Savitri got along very well

1:14:35

with the set of Hindu nationalists who are like,

1:14:37

yeah, the Nazi seemed good. And

1:14:39

she's particularly taken with doctor

1:14:42

Asit Krishna Mukshi, one

1:14:44

of India's few actual committed

1:14:46

Nazis. In nineteen thirty

1:14:48

seven and thirty eight, Mukarshi started to publish

1:14:50

a bi monthly pro Nazi magazine,

1:14:53

The New Mercury. Savitri met him in

1:14:55

early nineteen thirty eight and they

1:14:57

didn't instantly fall in love, but

1:15:01

she fell in love with like his mind. She was probably

1:15:03

bisexual, but certainly

1:15:05

wasn't interested in Mukershi in any way. But

1:15:08

she falls in love with like this guy's

1:15:10

Nazism. Basically, they're that kind

1:15:12

of so they're an god.

1:15:15

That's so, I mean, yeah,

1:15:17

it's not great.

1:15:18

That's bleak because it's like, yeah,

1:15:21

I mean, if you're gonna marry a Nanzi

1:15:25

and you're not even attracted to them, no

1:15:28

excuse, no excuse way, but

1:15:30

you know what I mean, she.

1:15:31

Has a little bit of an excuse. But we're getting to it.

1:15:34

So you are cutting this lady all kinds

1:15:36

of slack, Robert.

1:15:37

I'm just explaining her, Do you have a crime?

1:15:41

Now?

1:15:42

So she doesn't. They don't get together right

1:15:44

away. She loves his understanding of

1:15:46

Nazi ideology, and particularly his emphasis

1:15:49

on the myths of the Old Arians, and

1:15:51

Mukershi was like obsessed with the Fule society

1:15:53

the tool of society, and it acquired a lot of their occult

1:15:55

writing. So he's like that kind of nerdy,

1:15:58

and Mukershi seems to like genuinely

1:16:00

appreciate Savitri's ideas and the fact

1:16:02

that she was just as much of a nerd for Nazism.

1:16:04

As he was, but he was baffled by her insistence

1:16:07

on staying in India while Nazi Germany

1:16:10

like rose to the heights of its power in

1:16:12

early nineteen thirty nine, He asked her, what

1:16:14

have you been doing in India all these years, with your ideas

1:16:17

and your potentialities, wasting your time and energy.

1:16:20

Go back to Europe where duty calls you. Go and

1:16:22

help the rebirth of Aryan Heathendom, where there

1:16:24

are still Rians strong and wide awake.

1:16:26

Go to him who is truly life and resurrection,

1:16:29

the leader of the Third Reich. Go at once.

1:16:31

Next year will be too late. And he

1:16:33

was kind of right about that. But sat who was convinced

1:16:36

that she could do yeah.

1:16:37

Yeah, I'm like, well historically okay,

1:16:41

yeah.

1:16:42

Savitri, though, was convinced that she could do more

1:16:44

for the cause of Nazism in India than in Germany.

1:16:47

She'd become close with members of the Rashtriya

1:16:50

Swaamsavik Song or rss

1:16:53

AD, a Hindu nationalist movement

1:16:55

that were very similar to the Nazis. The

1:16:58

founder or one of the founders, ab Hedjwar,

1:17:00

formed the group to defend Hindu society from daily

1:17:03

onslaughts by outsiders and he included

1:17:06

Muslim Indians as members of that group. Like

1:17:09

all fascist organizations, the RSS

1:17:11

had a uniform khaki shorts, a white

1:17:13

shirt, and a black cap. RSS members

1:17:15

met daily to train with bamboo beat sticks

1:17:17

called lafi's and to learn about Hindutva

1:17:20

Hindu nationalism. In nineteen thirty

1:17:23

nine, Savitri wrote a warning to the Hindus.

1:17:25

The book's forward was written by G. D. Savarkar,

1:17:28

brother to one of the co founders of the RSS,

1:17:30

and according to an article by South Asian affairs

1:17:33

analyst Peter Friedrich, quote Devi advanced

1:17:35

V. D. Savarkar's thesis of Hindutfa that

1:17:38

India is a Hindu nation of Hindu people

1:17:40

and only for Hindu people. She claimed

1:17:42

that Hindu society is India itself,

1:17:44

called Hinduism the national religion of India

1:17:47

and suggested that Hindu should tell non Hindus,

1:17:49

we represent India, not you. Therefore

1:17:52

India is ours not yours. Shears

1:17:55

urged Hindus to recover, along with their

1:17:57

national consciousness, their military virtues

1:17:59

of old to rebecome a military

1:18:01

race. The method, she said, should

1:18:03

be the organization of the young men in pledge

1:18:06

bound military like batches with Hindu nationalism

1:18:08

as their only ideal. And here's

1:18:11

where I pause to note that the current Prime Minister

1:18:13

of India, Narendra Modi, is a member

1:18:15

of the RSS. A warning to

1:18:17

Hindus is still considered to be a deeply

1:18:19

influential text within the Hindu nationalist movement

1:18:22

and the RSS. Mody probably

1:18:24

read it as a child and a list of his crimes

1:18:26

in the thousands of murders and moss bombings and beatings

1:18:29

carried out by Hindu nationalists against Indian Muslims

1:18:31

would go beyond the scope of this episode, but it

1:18:33

is worth noting that the current authoritarian lurch

1:18:35

by India, the world's largest democracy, owes

1:18:38

at least a decent amount to the work of Savitri

1:18:41

Devi. So that's cool, you're

1:18:43

in love with her?

1:18:45

Oh my god.

1:18:46

I mean it is a sign of where this is going

1:18:48

that I kind of glossed over the

1:18:50

fact that she played a role in the establishment

1:18:53

of what's starting to become a fascist

1:18:56

dictatorship in India.

1:18:57

Uh huh.

1:18:58

We just have so much to cover, We

1:19:01

have so much to cover.

1:19:02

We don't have time for the fascist dictatorship

1:19:04

today. We have some time,

1:19:06

but we have Okay, Okay, well, we'll make time.

1:19:08

We'll make time for the fascist.

1:19:10

In nineteen forty Britain and Germany

1:19:12

went to war. Savitri's extremist beliefs

1:19:14

were well known at this point, and she was forced to

1:19:16

marry Mukershi in order to stay in the country.

1:19:18

So that's why they get married. It's basically a green

1:19:20

card thing. Yeah, got it. She described

1:19:23

it as a secless marriage, primarily to

1:19:25

allow her to stay in the country, and she did what

1:19:27

she could for Nazism while in India, spying

1:19:29

on British military positions for the Axis

1:19:31

and facilitating communication between Subhas

1:19:34

Chandra Bose, leader of the National Indian

1:19:36

Army, a pro Axis group, and the Japanese

1:19:38

government. In a different world, these contributions

1:19:41

might have played a role in a Japanese invasion of India,

1:19:44

but World War Two went the way it did, and Hitler

1:19:46

eventually shot himself in a bunker to avoid

1:19:48

capture.

1:19:49

I'm familiar.

1:19:49

Vitry learned of his death through an overheard

1:19:52

conversation from two Muslim men on

1:19:54

the Marabar coast. She was inconsolable

1:19:57

for days over the death of her hero and the end

1:19:59

of the belief system. She had dedicated her life

1:20:01

to championing but mcare. She told her

1:20:03

not to worry. This was merely part of

1:20:05

the cycle of ages, and the dark age

1:20:08

brought on by Hitler's defeat would someday

1:20:11

end, and likewise, Jamie,

1:20:13

one of this episode must now end. Okay,

1:20:16

but this dark age we'll continue on Thursday

1:20:19

with part two of the story of Savitri Devin.

1:20:21

No, Okay, how

1:20:26

you doing, Jamie.

1:20:27

Okay, I'm just unclenching.

1:20:31

That's important for the next two minutes.

1:20:33

And then we got to talk about it again.

1:20:35

I got it.

1:20:35

Abka always be clenching.

1:20:38

Yeah, go plug your pluggables

1:20:40

first.

1:20:40

Oh right, Uh, leave

1:20:42

that in. I want people to know that. Yeah,

1:20:45

overshare had to pee, and also leave

1:20:48

in Robert blowing his nose on the mic.

1:20:50

Then Chris, you

1:20:52

can edit out horrible.

1:20:54

Chris, you can edit out the part where Robert is.

1:20:56

Like young Delicious after

1:20:59

licking his own it's not off the mic, but everything

1:21:01

else should probably stay in.

1:21:03

I feel like this is legally abused.

1:21:06

You could probably report me to HR. Could

1:21:08

be fun, could be fun.

1:21:11

My Twitter is Jamie

1:21:14

Loftus help man on my Instagram

1:21:16

is at Jamie christ Superstar and I'm

1:21:19

touring for the better part of February.

1:21:22

You can go to my website, Jamie loftus

1:21:24

is Innocent dot com to

1:21:26

find out where yay yeah.

1:21:29

And you can find Sophie

1:21:33

on Twitter yeh, finding her at

1:21:35

Why Underscore Sophie Underscore

1:21:38

Why. And that's it. That's all

1:21:41

you can find of us online, which

1:21:44

are on Behind the Bastards dot com, including

1:21:47

the full free text of Hitler's Priestess If

1:21:49

you want to read this book. The

1:21:52

episode's over. Go stop

1:21:54

the French from murdering cats. Yes,

1:21:58

great,