Jihad & The New Left Part 2
Otto
Skorzeny had been sent to the country by
Gehlen. In 1952, like thousands of other former Nazis,
Skorzeny was declared entNazifi ziert (deNazified) by the West German
government, which now meant
the could travel from Spain into other
Western countries. The CIA and the Gehlen BND dispatched him to various “trouble
spots.” The fact that the Gehlen Org evolved
into the Bundesnachrichtendienst ( BND), West Germany’s foreign intelligence
service seems to represent the fruition of the
Nazi plan to regain power in a defeated Germany, as outlined at the
Strasbourg conference. Many former Nazis
received the support of Odessa members
at the polls. Dr. Gerhard Schröder, who served with Hjalmar Schacht during the Third Reich, became Interior Minister in the
Bonn government. Hans Globke, who had worked for Adolf Eichmann in the Jewish Affairs department and
helped draft the 1935 Nuremberg laws, became Chancellor Konrad Adenauer‘s national security advisor in the
1960s and was, according to the Guardian, “the main liaison with the CIA and
NATO.”33Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, a
Nazi since 1933, was elected chancellor in 1968 and many other
former Nazis continued to exercise great
influence in the West German government. According to In field:
From his office in Madrid, Skorzeny’s influence
in the Federal Republic of Germany was duly noted by every chancellor from Adenauer on and the West German government used
his worldwide fame and his commando experience to reestablish German prestige
and power in other parts of the world. 34
On
Skorzeny’s payroll were former SS
agents, French OAS terrorists and secret
police from Portugal’s Policia
Internacional e de Defesa do Estadoor PIDE (International and State Defence
Police). PIDE was the main tool of repression used by the authoritarian regime
of António de Oliveira Salazar in
Portugal during the Estado Novo.
Skorzeny had also become engaged in the Organisation de l’armée secrète(
OAS), an ultra-right faction within the French Army. The OAS was
controlled from the outside
by financier Pierr
Guillain de Benouville in cooperation with Allen Dulles of the CIA, Hjalmar
Schacht and Francois Genoud.35 Described by the London Observeras “one
of the world’s leading Nazis,” Genoud
managed the hidden Swiss treasure of the
Third Reich which had been stolen from
Jews.36 Genoud later employed these funds to pick up the tab for the legal
defense of Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, and Carlos the Jackal. 37
During
World War II, while stationed in Lyon between 1943 and 1944, Barbie had
been responsible for the murder of at least 4,000 resistance workers and Jews as well as the deportation of another 15,000
to concentration camps. In 1947, Barbie became an agent for the 66th Detachment
of the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), after which he assisted in the
recruitment of the Stay-Behind networks. 38
In 1951, Barbie fled to
Juan Peron’s Argentina after he had been shuttled out of
Germany by the CIA with a hand from
the Vatican. Barbie then emigrated to
Bolivia in 1952, where he lived under the alias Klaus Altmann. Barbie and Skorzeny were soon forming death squads such
as the Angels of Death in Bolivia, the Anti-Communist Alliance in Argentina and in Spain, with the chief Italian Gladio operator, Stepheno Della Chiaie, the Guerrillas of Christ the
King.39
The
OAS was created in support of a conspiracy to block President Charles de
Gaulle’s plans to grant independence to
Algeria. The legitimacy of
Pétain’s Vichy leadership was constantly challenged by de Gaulle, who had been living in exile in
England during World War II, from where
he claimed to represent the true French government. Following the Allied
invasion of France in June 1944, de Gaulle proclaimed the Provisional
Government of the French Republic. He
resigned in 1946 due to political conflicts and founded his own party, the Rally of the French People
(RFP) in 1947. Although he retired from politics in the early 1950s, after the
RPF’s failure to win power he was voted back
to power as prime minister by the French Assembly during the crisis of May 1958
and the turmoil of the Algerian War of Independence. De Gaulle led the writing
of a new constitution and the founding of the Fifth Republic.
Many within the military and the secret services
who had supported the coup of de Gaulle
expected that the General would support a policy to keep Algeria under French colonial rule. To their
surprise, however, de Gaulle supported
its independence. They therefore founded the
OAS, which involved secret soldiers of the NATO and
CIA stay-behind units. 40 The OAS would include a number of former members
of the synarchist and Freemasonic Cagoule, including François Mitterrand who would be instrumental in the
conspiracy.41 The OAS was officially
formed in Franco’s
Spain in Madrid in January 1961, where it teamed up with Skorzeny who trained leading components of
the competing interests of both the OAS
and the Front de Libération Nationale( FLN), a socialist political party
founded in 1954 for independence from France for Algeria. The OAS attempted to
prevent Algerian independence by acts of sabotage and assassination in
both France and French Algerian
territories. This included several attempts to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle, one of these being featured in
a fictionalized version
recreated in the 1971 book by Frederick Forsyth,
The Day of the Jackal, and in the 1973
film of the same name. Skorzeny was at that time also
reportedly providing assistance to the right-wing fascist Jabotinsky networks
of the Israeli Mossad, through the services of James Jesus Angleton’s CIA operations in Spain. 42
Skorzeny was simultaneously assisting
the FLN, one of the first anti-colonial groups to use large-scale violence. Sartre became perhaps the most eminent supporter
of the FLN in the Algerian War. As a
consequence, he became a domestic target of the
OAS, escaping two bomb attacks in the early 60s. Sartre’s pupil Frantz Fanon became the primary ideologue of
the FLN. As reported by Pierre
Beaudry, Fanon and Otto Skorzeny were the theoretician and the
commando-training officer of the FLN, both advocating terrorism as a means of achieving national
liberation. 43 Several Third Reich
veterans, including Maj. Gen. Otto Ernst Remer who served as Hitler’s bodyguard, helped smuggle weapons to
the Algerian rebels seeking independence, while other Nazi advisors provided military instruction.
In November 1954, the FLN launched a
series of attacks against the French military and issued a proclamation calling
on all Muslims of Algeria to join the “ Jihad” for “the restoration of the
Algerian State, sovereign, democratic, and social, within the framework of the
principle of Islam.” The response was
given, not by the Minister of Defense, but by the Minister of the Interior,
Francois Mitterrand, who replied: “The
only possible negotiation is war.” Pierre Beaudry describes the atrocities that
ensued:
In August 1955, the FLN was deployed to conduct the massacre of Philippeville,
murdering 123 people, including women and children. Algeria’s Governor-General
Soustelle ordered massive retaliation attacks, which, according to some
estimates, killed 1,273 guerrilla Fighters (the FLN reported 12,000 deaths).
The truth is probably halfway, about 6,000 victims. The cycle of vengeance was
on. Thousands of Muslims were tortured and killed in an orgy of bloodletting
organized by the French Armed Forces and police. The idea was to unleash an unstoppable
process of escalation of violence and retaliation. 44
Having survived the assassination attempt on
his life in 1954 perpetrated by the
Muslim Brotherhood , Nasser
continued to impede American designs in the region. The US adopted the Eisenhower Doctrine, pledging to protect
Middle Eastern countries from communism, and although Nasser was not a supporter of communism, his promotion of Arab nationalism
threatened surrounding pro-Western states. Despite opposition from the
governments of Jordan, Saudi Arabia,
Iraq, and Lebanon, Nasser gained influence among many of the citizens
of those and other Arab countries. In Jordan, many supported him, and
Palestinian refugees and citizens saw him as the only Arab leader that could
challenge Israel.
When, in 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the
UK, France, and Israel colluded in a
secret agreement to take over the canal and occupy parts of Egypt . 45 Contributing
to what is known as the Suez Crisis,
Israel then crossed the Sinai, and quickly advanced through the peninsula
to achieve their objectives, while the British and French bombarded Egyptian
airfields in the canal zone. Nasser
then responded by blocking the canal. The
Eisenhower administration condemned the aggression, and intervened to
support UN resolutions demanding the withdrawal of the invaders, of Israel’s return to the 1949 armistice lines,
and for a United Nations Emergency Force
(UNEF) of peacekeepers.
The
Psychological Strategy Board ( PSB), later renamed the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB),
continued to shift the focus of their efforts on Islam. The board established
an Ad Hoc Working Group on Islam in 1957
that included officials from the US Information Agency, the State Department, and the CIA. Its goal was to consider the efforts of
public and private US organizations with regards to Islam and come up with an “Outline Plan of
Operations.” The plan devised that the US would favor “reform” groups like
the Muslim Brotherhood over traditional
Muslims, concluding: “Both the Chairman and the
CIA member felt that with the Islamic world being divided as it is
between reactionary and reformist groups, it might be found
profitable to place emphasis
on programs which would strengthen the reformist groups.” 46 The plan listed a
dozen recommendations for strengthening ties with Muslim organizations,
especially those with a strong anticommunist platform. As is typical with
the CIA, operations were to be protected
by “plausible deniability.” As the report concluded: “Programs which are
indirect and unattributable are more likely to be effective and will avoid the
charge that we are trying to use religion for political purposes. Overt use of
Islamic organizations for the inculcation of hard-line propaganda is to be
avoided.” 47 The CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination ( OPC) was responsible
for the implementation of the plan.
Following the assassination attempt on Nasser,
Said Ramadan and other
Brotherhood conspirators were charged with treason and stripped of their Egyptian citizenship. Many members of
the Muslim Brotherhood were shuttled to the CIA’s ally
Saudi Arabia. Loftus discovered that the British Secret Service
convinced American intelligence that the Muslim Brotherhood would be indispensable as “freedom
fighters” in preparation for the next major war,
which was anticipated against the Soviet Union.
Kim Philby, Soviet doubleagent and son of “Abdullah” Philby, assisted
the US in recruiting members of the Muslim Brotherhood who, once they were
brought to Saudi Arabia, says Loftus, “were given jobs as religion education
instructors.” 48
Thus, beginning in the 1960s with the CIA’s tacit approval, the Salafi became more formally allied to the
Wahhabis who became the principal patrons of the Brotherhood, which set up
branches in most Arab states. Among them was Mohammed Qutb, the younger brother of Sayyed
Qutb. There he edited and published his brother’s books and taught as a
professor of Islamic Studies at Saudi
universities. While in Saudi Arabia, he
conceived of the organization now known as the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (
WAMY), thanks to large donations from the
bin Laden family. Osama bin
Laden’s brother Omar was at one time its executive director.
CIA
officer Robert Dreher arranged for Jordan to provide Ramadan
a diplomatic passport and even “sent him to West Germany as
Ambassadorat-large.” 49 Ramadan completed his doctorate in Islamic Law at a
German University while traveling around the Muslim world on behalf of the
World Muslim Congress. As detailed by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ian
Johnson in A Mosque in Munich, the CIA
connived to have Said Ramadan take over
a Munich mosque project headed by ex- Nazi Gerhard von Mende. During World War II, von Mende, as head of the
Caucasus division at the Ostministerium, the office overseeing the Nazi-occupied eastern territories, pioneered
the use of the minority populations of the Soviet empire, many of them Muslim,
into a Fifth column. Following Germany’s defeat, von Mende
was hired by
the US, where his many Muslim agents
went to work for Radio Liberty.
Part of this operation was the creation of
the American Committee for Liberation
from Bolshevism ( AMCOMLIB). Its main
purpose was to run Radio Liberty, which
was beamed into the Soviet Union, but
the US government
misled
listeners and supporters in the US into thinking it was run by émigrés and
prominent journalists instead of the
CIA. It was AMCOMLIB CIA
officers Eric Kuniholm and Robert
Dreher who provided funding for
Said Ramadan to spearhead their activities in Munich. In 1958, those
loyal to von Mende had decided to build a mosque in Munich to become the Munich Islamic Center. However, the project was soon hijacked by the CIA, who intended to have it instead headed
by Said Ramadan. Through CIA sponsorship, the mosque became the headquarters of the Brotherhood in Europe. Its influence spread out all over Germany,
then Europe, and even the US, spawning a network of related Islamic centers.
Ramadan, with covert CIA
help, reached the pinnacle
of his influence with the assumption of leadership of the Muslim World Leauge in the 1960s. Ramadan
co-founded the League with the Grand Mufti, al Husseini. In 1962, with CIA encouragement the Saudis had created the Muslim World League to work for “political
solidarity,” that is, acceptance of
Wahhabism by other Muslim communities.50
In 1963, Ramadan gave King Saud
the official proposal to found the League and was granted a diplomatic passport
as its Ambassadorat-large. According to the statute, the head of the League’s
secretariat has always been a Saudi.
Underwritten initially by several donors, including Aramco, then a CIA collaborator, the League established a powerful
international presence with representatives in 120 countries. In addition to
Ramadan, it included Brotherhood-connected Abul Ala Maududi and a Wahhabi –influenced Indian scholar named Maulana Abu Hasan al
Nadvi. Maududi was the founder of a party in
Pakistan named Jamaat-i-Islami, which was the primary supporter of the
CIA’s “ Jihad” in Afghanistan. Many of
the party’s leaders, like Fareed Paracha, Munawar Hassan, Hafiz Hussain, and Qazi Hussain were on the payroll of CIA. 51
Through the
Muslim World Leauge, Ramadan in association with the Mufti Haj Amin Al Husseini, spread the political “Islamic”
doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood .
Following Al Husseini, despite generally viewing the West with disdain, Said Ramadan was more concerned with the
Soviet communism as the foremost enemy of
Islam. As early as 1946, the US War Department observed that the Mufti
had informed his followers that communism violated Quranic doctrine. 52
However,
Nasser’s power continued to grow. In 1957, in response to growing threats
from Turkey, the Syrian government invited him to establish a formal union with
Egypt , resulting in the United Arab Republic (UAR), which came into being in
1958. In 1961 Syria seceded from the
union, though Egypt continued to be known officially as the UAR. The Americans therefore took the chance to confront Nasser in a
proxy war in Yemen. Yemeni officers led by Abdullah as-Sallal, a supporter of Nasser, rebelled against Imam al-Badr of the Kingdom
of North Yemen in 1962, proclaiming their country the Yemen Arab Republic.
Al-Badr began receiving support from King
Faisal of Saudi Arabia to
reinstate the kingdom, convincing Nasser
to dispatch Egyptian troops to strengthen the new government. By 1963, Nasser had sent 15,000 Egyptian soldiers to
Yemen, but the war remained a stalemate. Referring to the CI A’s exploitation of the Brotherhood in
Yemen, former CIA covert operations specialist,
John Baer, in Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi
Crude noted:
At the bottom of it all was this dirty little
secret in Washington: The White House looked on the Brothers as a silent ally,
a secret weapon against (what else?) communism. This covert action started in
the 1050s with the Dulles brothers—Allen at the
CIA and John Foster at the State
Department—when they approved Saudi
Arabia’s funding of Egypt ’s Brothers
against Nasser.
Like any other truly effective covert action,
this one was strictly off the books. There was no CIA funding,
no memorandum notification to Congress.
Not a penny came out of the Treasury to fund it. In other words, no record. All the White House had to
do was give a wink and a nod to
countries harboring the Muslim Brothers, like
Saudi Arabia and Jordan. 53
Being the only candidate for the position,
with virtually all of his political opponents being forbidden by law from running for office, Nasser was again elected president in 1965.
That same year, he imprisoned Sayyed
Qutb. Unable to silence Qutb by
incarceration, Nasser accused him of
conspiring with the Saudis in attempts to assassinate him and had Qutb executed in 1966. The Muslim Brotherhood
consequently sentenced Nasser to death.
Fascist International Part 1
The CIA’s recruitment of ex-Nazis formed the
backbone of what essentially became a Fascist International. And though it
obviously posed a very real subversive threat, the
international movement flourished without obstruction from any of the world’s
leading governments. Rather, though otherwise perceived as a fringe political
movement, it exercised important behind-thescenes influence. And it built on Nazi occultism to construct an even
more elaborate cult of personality around the figure of Hitler, who came to
be worshipped as a sort of martyr and
messiah.
An important inspiration to the post-war fascists
was Julius Evola (1898–1974), who is recognized as the primary heir of René
Guénon’s Traditionalism. 1 After the fighting
in World War I, Evola was attracted to the avant-garde and briefly
associated with Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist movement. Evola became the leading
representative of Dadaism in Italy through his painting and poetry. Among the
many influences of Evola included
Plato, Jacob Boehme, Arthur de Gobineau,
Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler whose Decline of the Westhe later
translated into Italian. Evola authored books covering themes such as Hermeticism,
the metaphysics of war, on sex magic, Tantra, Buddhism, Taoism and the Holy
Grail.
Evola regarded Guénon as “the unequaled
master of our epoch.”2 Evola was introduced to Traditionalism around 1927 after
he joined the Theosophical League founded by Arturo Reghini, a Roman occultist
immersed in alchemy, magic and theurgy, who was a correspondent of Guénon. In
1927, along with other Italian occultists, Evola founded the Gruppo di Ur,
which performed rituals intended to inspire the fascist regime with the spirit
of imperial Rome. Ultimately, Evola sought to transform fascism as outlined in
his book Imperialismo Pagano (“Pagan Imperialism”), in which he celebrated the
ideal of ancient Rome, denounced the Christian church and the secular universalism
of American democracy as well as Soviet communism.
According to Joscelyn Godwin, “the basic outlines
of Evola’s prehistory resemble those of Theosophy, with Lemurian, Atlantean,
and Aryan root-races succeeding each other, and a pole-shift marking the
transition from one epoch to another.” 3 Evola believed that a race of “Nordic”
people, anciently emanating from Golden
Age Arctic Hyperborea, had played a founding role in Atlantis and the high
cultures both of the East and West. Likewise,
Evola regarded the German peoples as a powerful corrective force against Christianity’s female spirituality. As
descendants of Northern- Aryans, the Germans had maintained their prehistoric
purity, preserving the primordial Tradition of masculine spirituality in their
Norse myths and their god Odin. The
Nordics regarded Asgard in the far north as the home of the gods, an ancestral
memory that linked them with the Indo- Aryans in the East.
Though
Evola didn’t follow Guénon
into Islam, he adopted his Traditionalist
thinking, writing, in reference to Guénon’s Crisis of the Modern World, his own
Revolt Against the Modern World. Like
Guénon, Evola believed the Western
world was in a state of crisis, where crass materialism had completely
overtaken more spiritual values,
which he identified with the
Primordial Tradition. As Goodrick-Clarke explained, “Invoking the heroic and
sacred values of this mythical tradition,
Evola advanced a radical doctrine of antiegalitarianism, anti-
democracy, anti-liberalism and
anti-Semitism. He scorned the modern world of popular rule and bourgeois
values, democracy and socialism,
seeing capitalism and communism as twin
aspects of the benighted reign of materialism.” 4
Evola also believed that mankind is living in
the Kali Yuga. To Evola, Tradition
represented a natural
hierarchy, which was
reflective of a corresponding spiritual hierarchy. In Pagan
Imperialism, Evola described a metaphysical
Aryo-Vedic tradition that allegedly governed the religious and political
institutions of archaic Indo-European societies,
which he contrasted to the secular, individualistic and liberal tendencies of
the modern world. The lower rungs of Aryo-Vedic society were concerned with
mere matter, while the higher castes were ruled by ever-higher grades of
spirit. Therefore, in the Hindu caste system, the slaves or workers (sudras)
are subordinated to the bourgeoisie or merchant class (vaisyas). Above them is
the warrior nobility (kshatriyas), though all are subject to the spiritual authority
of the priestly class (brahmins). Evola
cites similar hierarchies as found in
Plato’s Republic, in ancient Iranian society and the feudalism the
European Middle Ages.
Evola
reflected the synarchist
belief in the
authority of adepts of
secret societies. According
to Evola, the superior priestly class of
the world of Tradition was not merely a professional priesthood, but royalty
itself because, in Evola’s view,
temporal power proceeded from spiritual authority. Quoting the Aryo-Vedic Laws of Manu, Evola claimed that in Traditional societies
the ruler was no “mere mortal” but “a great deity standing in the form of a
man.” As such, Pharaohs of Egypt were regarded as manifestations of the Sun-god
of Ra or Horus, while the emperors of Rome were the incarnations of Zeus and the Assyrian kings were revered
as Baal or the Persian shahs as gods of
light. Alluding to the theurgic nature of ancient magical ritual, Evola regards kings and the priestly caste
as performing the sacred rites that connected human society to the gods: “The supernatural
element was the foundation of the idea of a traditional patriciate and of
legitimate royalty: what constituted an ancient aristocrat was not merely a biological
legacy or a racial selection, but rather a sacred tradition.”
Evola’s theory of regression through
the Vedic cycles of ages was reflected in
an inversion of the natural hierarchy of castes. Once the sacred aristocracy of
the mythical Golden Age is lost, power is transferred in reverse order down to
the warrior caste, represented in the monarchies of Europe. Evola celebrated the Roman Empire as a major
attempt to reverse the forces of Mediterranean Southern decadence and forge a
new unitary state based on heroic
AryanWestern spirituality. He speculated that Rome’s new rigor and
ascent were due to the influence of prehistoric peoples of Hyperborean origin,
who regenerated the aboriginal races of the pre-Roman Italian peninsula. Evola regarded the advent of Christianity as a process of unprecedented
decline. The Christian notion of egalitarianism, irrespective of race, tradition
and caste, undermined Roman duty, honor, and hierarchy.
Though initially a destructive barbarian force
that contributed to the end to the Roman Empire, the German tribes brought
warrior leadership, feudal hierarchy and
freedom into the medieval Europe. When this aristocracy decays, power shifts to
the third caste, the merchant class, represented by the Jewish bankers and financiers of the Italian Renaissance. These Evola faults for leading the way for the
capitalist and middle classes who gained power by exploiting liberal and
democratic ideologies to foment bourgeois revolutions in the nineteenth
century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, organized labor and
communist revolution sought to transfer power to the lowest of castes, the proletariat,
reducing all values to matter, machines and the reign of quantity.
Just as
he affirmed the natural hierarchy between different individuals of the same
race, so Evola affirmed a natural rank
ordering of the different human races. As the best-preserved examples of the
primordial celestial Hyperboreans, Evola
affirmed the white race in its different branches as the creator of the greatest planetary civilizations.
To Evola, the swastika is the symbol of this tradition and
the emblem of Guénon’s Lord of the World. Evola publicly celebrated Italian fascism as a means to ensure and restore
white supremacy in a modern decadent world:
And if Fascist Italy, among the various Western nations is
the one which first wished for a
reaction against the degeneration of the
materialist, democratic and
capitalist civilisation, against the
League of Nations ideology, there
are grounds for thinking, without even any scintilla of chauvinistic
infatuation, that Italy will be on the
front line among the forces which will guide the future world and will restore
the supremacy of the white race. 6
Mussolini, being impressed by these ideas, wrote
a journal article in reply to Reghini’s call for fascism to initiate an era of “pagan
imperialism.” However, while he was generally sympathetic with its aims and
ideology, Evola never joined Mussolini’s National
Fascist Party. He hoped instead to influence the regime toward his own theories of fascism and his Traditionalist philosophy. Nevertheless, Mussolini read Evola’s Synthesis of the Doctrine of Racein
1941 and invited him to personally offer his praise. Because Evola suggested that race had a spiritual
basis and not necessarily a physical one,
Mussolini, he explained, had found in his work a uniquely Roman form of
fascist racism. Mussolini then
adopted Evola’s ideas as the
official fascist racial theory in 1938, when Italy enacted its own racial laws distinct
from those of Nazi Germany.
With
Mussolini’s backing, Evola
launched the journal Blood and Spirit. Though not entirely in agreement
with Nazi racial theorists, Evola traveled to Germany in February 1942
and obtained support for German collaboration on the publication from
leading Nazi race theorists.
Finally, Evola was one of the first
people to greet Mussolini when he was broken out of prison by
Otto Skorzeny’s famous rescue mission of 1943. After the invasion of Italy by allied forces during World War II,
Evola went to Germany where he worked for the SS’s Ahnenerbe.
Evola regarded the SS as a model
elite, of which he wrote in Vita Italiana, “We are inclined to the opinion that
we can see the nucleus of an Order in
the higher sense of tradition in the ‘Black Corps.’” 7 Again in Vita Italiana, Evola shared his aspiration “for a Deep
Italian-Germanic Alliance” and said,
“Beyond the confines of the party
and of any political-administrative structure, an elite in the form
of a new ‘Order’—that is, a kind of asceticmilitary organization that is held
together by the principles of ‘loyalty’ and ‘honor,’ must form the basis of the
new state.” 8
Evola’s proposed order was to be a reflection of such
a past alliance forged by the
Ghibelines. The Ghibelines, to which belonged the House of Savoy, were the
Italian branch of the House of Guelph, who
during the medieval period were represented by the German Hohenstaufen imperial line in opposition to the
papacy. To Evola, they belong to the tradition of the Grail and represent the apex of Western
Civilization. 9 The House of Savoy, who
became Kings of Italy in 1861 through the assistance of Mazzini and Garibaldi,
were long supporters of the Italian Fascists. It was Victor Emmanuel III who
appointed Mussolini as prime minister on
October 28, 1922, and remained silent as
Mussolini built his totalitarian regime. However, Himmler then
commissioned his favorite occultist Karl Maria Wiligut to assess Evola.
Apparently jealous, Wiligut concluded
that “Evola works from a basic Aryan concept but is quite ignorant of
prehistoric Germanic institutions and their meaning,” areas Wiligut was
supposed to have excelled in, and recommended rejecting Evola’s “utopian”
proposal. 10
In the post-war years, Evola’s writings were held in high esteem by members
of the neo-fascist movement in Italy and
because of this he was put on trial from June through November 1951, on the
charge of attempting to revive fascism
in Italy. He was acquitted because he
could prove that he was never a member of the fascist party, and that all
accusations were made without evidence to prove that his writings glorified fascism.
Another of the leading ideologues of the
post-war fascist revival was Sir Oswald Mosley,
member of the Children of the Sun, devotee
of Aleister Crowley and founder of
the British Union of Fascists. In 1920,
Mosley married Lady Cynthia Curzon, daughter of Round Tabler, Lord Curzon. When his father died in 1928, Mosley
became Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet, of Ancoats. In 1931 Mosley went on a
study tour of the “new movements” of Italy’s Benito Mussolini and other fascists, and returned
convinced that it was the way forward for him and for Britain. He was
determined to unite the existing fascist movements and created the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932.
Cynthia died in 1933, after which Mosley married his mistress Diana
Mitford, one of the six infamous Mitford sisters, who achieved
contemporary notoriety for their controversial and stylish lives. Diana and
Oswald married in secret in Germany in 1936, in the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, where Hitler was one of the guests.
Mosley spent large amounts of his private fortune on the British Union of Fascists, negotiating with
Hitler, through Diana, for permission to
broadcast commercial radio to Britain from Germany.
Diana’s sister, Jessica
Mitford, married Esmond Romilly, who was a nephew-by-marriage of Sir
Winston Churchill. Unity
Mitford (1914-1948), who was conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario
where her family had gold mines, was famous for her adulation of and friendship
with Hitler. She shot herself in the
head days after Britain declared war on Germany, but failed to kill herself and
eventually died of pneumococcal meningitis at West Highland Cottage Hospital,
Oban. However, investigative journalist Martin Bright, as revealed in an
article in The New Statesman, has discovered evidence suggesting that Unity may
have faked her injuries to hide the fact that she was carrying Hitler’s
child.12
After the war Mosley was contacted by his former
supporters and persuaded to rejoin politics. He formed the Union Movement,
calling for a single nationstate covering the continent of Europe, and later attempted
to launch a National Party of Europe to
this end. An influential early member of Mosley’s Union Movement was Francis Parker Yockey (1917-1960). Yockey was active with many far-right causes
around the world and remains one of theseminal influences in many extremist
right movements. These included, in addition to the Union Movement, James Madole’s
National Renaissance Party (
NRP), the GermanAmerican Bund, the National German-American Alliance and
William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts. In early 1946, Yockey had worked for the US War Department
as a post-trial review attorney for the
Nuremberg Trials in Germany, only to resign in disgust at what he
perceived to be biased procedures. From that point forward, he remained
dedicated solely to his cause of reviving fascism. He split with Mosley and
with other former Mosleyites formed the European Liberation Front (ELF) in 1948–49.
Aside from Oswald Spengler,
Yockey was also heavily
influenced by the ideas of Carl Schmitt, and is best known for the 1948
book Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, under the pen name Ulick
Varange. The book, which was dedicated to Adolf
Hitler, “the hero of the Second World War,” was endorsed by far-right
thinkers around the world, including Julius
Evola. Based on his interpretation of
Spengler, the book argues for a culture-based, totalitarian future for
the preservation of Western culture. Imperium subscribes to Spengler’s suggestion that Germany had been destined to fulfill the “Roman” role in Western Civilization by
uniting all its constituent states into one large empire. Like Spengler, he rejected the biological view of
race, preferring a spiritual conception tied to Karl Haushofer’s idea of geopolitics. Unlike Spengler, however, Yockey believed in German Nazism and supported various fascist and neo-fascist
causes for the remainder of his life, including
anti-Semitism. In 1949, Yockey published The Proclamation of Londonas the
manifesto of his ELF, which opposed America and
Israel with a pan-European fascist order.
By fusing
anti-Semitism with anti-Americanism,
Yockey identified the United States rather than Russia as Europe’s main enemy. Unlike most
European and American neo-fascists who advocated an alliance with the United
States against communism, Yockey spent
the rest of his life attempting to forge an alliance between the worldwide
forces of communism and the international network of the extreme Right. Yockey believed that true Rightists should
aid the spread of communism and Third
World anti-colonial movements wherever possible, with an aim toward weakening
or overthrowing the United States. Yockey spent part of 1953 meeting Gamal Nasser in Cairo, and maintaining links with
Otto Skorzeny. 13 Yockey worked briefly for the Egyptian Information Ministry,
writing anti- Zionist propaganda, seeing Arab nationalism as another ally to
challenge “the Jewish-American power.”
Yockey was continuously pursued by the FBI for over a decade and was finally
arrested in 1960, when authorities discovered falsified passports and birth
certificates in his suitcase. Betraying his interest in
the occult, papers found at the time of his arrest
included his own essays on the principle of polarity in the psyche, a book on
palmistry and politics, and a bibliography of books on the “second body,” on
reincarnation and on cosmic rays. 14
At a conference in Venice in 1962, to
co-ordinate this growth in panEuropean nationalism, the National Party of
Europe (NPE) was formed. The idea of an
NPE began when Oswald Mosley launched
his Europe a Nation campaign after World
War II as a counterbalance to the growing power of the US and USSR. Europe a
Nation was a policy that was the cornerstone of his Union Movement. Where
Mosley had previously been associated with a peculiarly British form of fascism with the British Union of Fascists, the Union Movement
attempted to redefine fascism by stressing the importance of developing a European nationalism rather
than country-based nationalisms. Europe a Nation consisted of the idea that all
European states should come together and pool their resources, including their colonies,
to work as one giant superstate under a system of corporatism.
The NPE was formed by the Italian Social
Movement ( MSI), the Union Movement, the Deutsche Reichspartei, Jeune Europe,
and the Mouvement d’Action Civique to help increase cross-border co-operation
and work towards European unity. The neofascist MSI, which was inspired by the
thought of Julius Evola, was formed in
1946 by supporters of former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The MSI is seen as the successor to both Mussolini’s Republican Fascist Party (PFR) as
well as the original National Fascist Party (PNF). From the end of the war to
the late 1980s, the MSI was the chief
organization of the European far-right. By the initiative of the MSI, the European Social Movement was established
after conferences in Rome in 1950 and Sweden in 1951. The MSI was also part of the New European Order
together with, among others, the Falange and the Socialist Reich Party.
Also in 1962, the World Union of National Socialists
(WUNS) was founded, when veteran US Navy Commander George Lincoln
Rockwell, who founded the American Nazi Party (ANP), met with National
Socialist Movement (NSM) chief Colin
Jordan. Colin and Rockwell agreed to
work towards developing an international network between movements as an
umbrella group for neo- Nazi organizations across the globe. This resulted in the
1962 Cotswold Declaration, which was signed by
neo- Nazis from the US, Britain,
France represented by Savitri Devi, West Germany, Austria and Belgium. More member nations would join later
throughout the decade, including
Argentina, Australia, Chile,
Ireland, South Africa, Japan and others.
One of the founding members of WUNS, representing
France, was Savitri Devi, a devoted
follower of Jordan’s NSM. Savitri Devi is the pseudonym of the Greek writer Maximiani
Portas, the first major post-war exponent of what
Goodrick-Clarke in Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of
Identity has characterized as Esoteric
Hitlerism. Despising what she considered to be the male-centered beliefs of liberty,
equality, and fraternity, she rejected
Christianity, Judaism and Marxism
and aspired to a pagan Aryan heritage with
reference to the pantheons of classical
Greece, ancient Germany, and Vedic
India. In 1932, she traveled to
India whose Hinduism she believed
had preserved the Aryan and Vedic
heritage. Like Evola, Savitri regarded
the caste system of Hinduism as the
archetype of racial laws intended to maintain the pure blood of the Aryans.
As mark of her devotion to
Hinduism, she adopted a Hindu name,
Savitri Devi (“Sun-rays Goddess” in Sanskrit), in honor of the female
solar deity.
Savitri’s ideas concerning the origins of the Aryans were drawn from the books of Bal
Gangadhar Tilak (1856 –1920),
the first popular leader of the Indian
Independence Movement. The British colonial authorities derisively called him
“Father of the Indian unrest.” He also helped found the All India Home Rule League in 1916–18, with Muhammad Ali
Jinnah and Annie Besant. Tilak was an accomplished scholar of ancient
Hindu sacred literature. In 1903, he wrote the book The Arctic Home in the Ved a s, in which he argued that the Ved a
scould only have been composed in the Arctic, and that Aryan bards had brought them south after the
onset of the last ice age.
Devi volunteered at the Hindu Mission whose
members believed that Hitler was an incarnation of Vishnu. She worked there as
an advocate against Judeo- Christianity and wrote A Warning to the Hindusto offer her support for Hindu
nationalism and independence, and to rally resistance to the spread of Christianity and Islam in
India. In 1940, she married Asit Krishna Mukherji, a Bengali Brahmin
with Nazi convictions who published
pro-Axis journals and who was involved in espionage activities on behalf of the
Japanese in India and Burma. After the war he made his living as an astrologer
and had Devi’s books printed.
Savitri Devi became close friends with
Luftwaffe hero Hans Ulrich Rudel who was
one of the most popular and visible figures of the
post-war neo- Nazi scene. In 1945, Rudel had fled to Argentina where he became a popular and prominent
member of the country’s large Nazi community
under the protection of the Peron
government. There he became the head of a rescue organization called the
Kameradenwerk, which assisted Nazi fugitives
and war criminals in escaping from Europe. With the assistance of Otto Skorzeny, Rudel played an important role in
recruiting large numbers of former Nazi
fugitives from Argentina for key posts in Egypt. Through Rudel’s
introductions, Savitri Devi was able to
meet leading Nazi émigrés in the Middle East and Spain. In the spring of 1957 she stayed near
Cairo with Johannes von Leers, Goebbels’s former anti-Semitic propaganda
expert, then heading Nasser’s
anti-Jewish broadcasting service. Von Leers too was able to introduce her to
many exNazis and SS officers who had found refuge in Egypt. Later, in 1961, she was the guest of
Otto Skorzeny in Madrid.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar