Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke,
New York University Press, 1998, £l7.95
Savitri Devi – real name Maximiani Portas; she was part Greek, part French – is an odd subject for a biography. This is someone of little importance to anyone other than extreme environmentalists and/or the ultra-right. Even the title is misleading. She never met Hitler (so cannot, logically, have been his ‘Priestess’) and was not even in Germany during the crucial years of the Third Reich. A long-term resident of India, where she associated with ultra-nationalist Hindus, she spied for the Japanese, providing them with information that helped them occupy Burma in 1941/1942. Finally reaching Germany in 1949, she got herself arrested and imprisoned for six months for pasting up pro-Nazi/Holocaust denial leaflets. Happily martyred, she travelled widely as a resident groupie of the post 1945 Nazi circuit, giving it a certain intellectual and cultural cachet with her well developed occult and animal welfare views.
The cover blurb pushes this as a major insight into the links between fascism and New Age movements. I waited in vain to find out what these were. Finally, in the last half a dozen pages of the 232 page text the name of one Herbert Gruhl (German Green Party) is tossed out. Gruhl, apparently, has said that the atom bomb is good because it destroys people …. and there are too many people in the world. Goodrick-Clarke says that Devi said (more or less) the same thing. Similar comparisons are made elsewhere in the text, but nothing emerges to demonstrate a direct linear connection between the ultra-right and the current Green, or New Age, movements.
What Goodrick-Clarke does provide is, firstly, a couple of chapters containing the most detailed and condensed information on the post-war dealings of the ultra right outside the files of the CIA, KGB, MI5/6 etc. At one point there is so much talk about the ‘Third Way’ and European unity that you could think you were reading a Downing Street briefing. But no, it’s Sir Oswald Mosley, in Malmo, in 1951. How ironic that his son, Max Mosley, with Bernie Ecclestone, should have funded New Labour; and how stupid that Giddens, and the other New Labour theorists, should have used such badly stained terminology.
Secondly, what emerges is the extent of the camouflage the ultra-right use to conceal their beliefs (though they would, no doubt, deny this and point to their diversity of interests). Back in the ’20s and ’30s it was cloaked in Theosophy, Hinduism, anti-industrialism, Blood and Soil etc. Once this was seen as the road that to led to Auschwitz, and it became in many countries a criminal offence to subscribe to or propagate such views. Goodrick-Clarke shows how the new generation of ultra-rightists have, as ever, hidden behind an array of diversionary symbols: the Knights Templar, ancient civilisations, ley lines, deluges, Atlantis, the hollow earth (also a favourite pre-1945), Nazi UFOs, alien abductions, and world government theories. (I always expect to see Chariot of the Gods mentioned in accounts of this type, but for some reason von Daniken never quite makes it.) The extent to which these have circulated in recent years and the scale of ultra-right activity in the USA mentioned in this book are deeply worrying trends; but we should recognise that because people like reading about such topics does not make them Nazis or prove a direct connection with fascist/ ultra-right movements.
This is an excellent companion piece to the author’s earlier and highly influential The Occult Roots of the Third Reich.