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Savitri Devi

Greek-French writer (1905-1982)

Savitri Devi Mukherji (born Maximiani Julia Portas; 30 September 1905 – 22 October 1982) was a French-born Greek fascist, Nazi sympathizer, and spy who served the Axis powers by committing espionage on the forces of the Allies of World War II in India. Devi was an Esoteric Hitlerist author who was later a leading member of the Neo-Nazi underground during the 1960s.

Savitri Devi in 1945.

Quotes

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  • Europe is only powerful; India is beautiful.
    • Savitri Devi, L'Etang au Lotus, p. 222, quoted in Koenraad Elst: The Saffron Swastika, p. 562
  • Europe is organized, marvellously organized; but India is cultivated.
    • Savitri Devi, L'Etang au Lotus, p. 240, quoted in Koenraad Elst: The Saffron Swastika, p. 562
  • The Hindu religion in its popular expression, as one can see it, is in sum the pre-Byzantine Greek religion, and all the ancient Aryan religions of Europe, minus the tribal spirit and, generally, plus the goodness and the respect for all beings.
    • Savitri Devi, L'Etang au Lotus, p. 239, quoted in Koenraad Elst: The Saffron Swastika, p. 562
  • The Hindu Aryas are, among the modern peoples of similar race and language, the only great people to have conserved a living Aryan religion. That is their most beautiful entitlement to glory, the secret of their strength and pride, even in the midst of all their misery the secret of their freedom under all the past and future phases of foreign domination.
    • Savitri Devi, L'Etang au Lotus, p. 205, quoted in Koenraad Elst: The Saffron Swastika, p. 563
  • The day when the whole of India will break its idols and worship God after his fashion, that day he will be Indian, like the Afghan across the mountains is an Afghan... but until then, he will remain in India a conqueror who remembers his old victories, the master of India cheated of his prey by the late-coming British, whom he accuses, in spite of the benefits they heap upon him, of favouring the Hindus.... The Indian Christian is a Hindu unaware of himself.
    • Savitri Devi, L'Etang au Lotus, p. 50ff, quoted in Koenraad Elst: The Saffron Swastika, p. 565
  • Hinduism is really superior to other religions, not for its spirituality, but for that still more precious thing it gives to its followers: a scientific outlook on religion and on life. Hindu spirituality is a consequence of that very outlook. We consider it useless to oppose: India to the “West,” as “spiritualistic” opposed to “materialistic.” Hindu superiority lies elsewhere; not in the opposition of Hindu thought to European thought, but in the fact of its greater consistency than that of European thought, of its greater faithfulness to life, of greater harmony between life and it; in the universality of the Hindu’s scientific outlook, compared to that of the Europeans.
    • Warning to the Hindus, quoted in Koenraad Elst: The Saffron Swastika
  • Long centuries before any foreigner had settled in India, the unity of the country was materialised in symbols. What more suggestive story than that, for instance, of Sati, Siva’s wife, whose body, divided, after her death, in fifty-one pieces, is lying still in fifty-one different places, therefore revered as “tirthasthans,” throughout the Indian Peninsula? One lies near Peshawar, one in Kamakhya, not far from India’s eastern boundaries; one in Benares, one in the very extreme South, others here and there. Fifty-one pieces, but one body; fifty-one “tirthasthans” in the name of the same Goddess, scattered over the same territory. Indeed, among the different interpretations that can be given of the legend of Sati, one can take it in this light: Sati is India herself, personified; India’s soil, sacred from end to end, is, with all its variety, the actual body of one great Goddess... And Indian nationalism means: devotion to this great Goddess.
    • Warning to the Hindus, quoted in Koenraad Elst: The Saffron Swastika
  • I worship impersonal Nature, which is neither "good" or "bad", and who knows neither love nor hatred. I worship Life; the Sun, Sustainer of life. I believe in the Law of everlasting struggle, which is the law of life, and in the duty of the best specimens of our race — the natural élite of mankind — to rule the earth, and evolve out of themselves a caste of supermen, a people 'like unto the Gods'.
  • To those privileged ones -- among whom we count ourselves -- the high-resounding "isms" to which their contemporaries ask them to give their allegiance are all equally futile: bound to be betrayed, defeated, and finally rejected by men at large, if containing anything really noble; bound to enjoy, for the time being, some sort of noisy success, if sufficiently vulgar, pretentious, and soul-killing to appeal to the growing number of mechanically conditioned slaves that crawl about our planet, posing as free men; all destined to prove, ultimately, of no avail.
  • A 'civilization' that makes such a ridiculous fuss about alleged 'war crimes' -- acts of violence against the actual or potential enemies of one's cause -- and tolerates slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories, and circuses and the fur industry (infliction of pain upon creatures that can never be for or against any cause), does not deserve to live. Out with it! Blessed the day it will destroy itself, so that a healthy, hard, frank and brave, nature-loving and truth-loving élite of supermen with a life-centered faith,-- a natural human aristocracy, as beautiful, on its own higher level, as the four-legged kings of the jungle -- might again rise, and rule upon its ruins, for ever!
  • In the Third Reich, even schoolchildren knew from their textbooks that this [= the Aryan] race had spread from the north to the south and east, and not the other way around.
    • Savitri Devi, Souvernirs et Réflexions d'une Aryenne, p 273, quoted in Koenraad Elst: The Saffron Swastika, p. 561
  • I asked Savitri ... how she would have received her mother. Without batting an eyelid, she said: 'I would have shot her.'
    • Savitri Devi about her mother who joined the Resistance movement. Quoted by Sumanta Banerjee, quoted from Koenraad Elst: The Saffron Swastika, p.581

Quotes about Savitri Devi

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  • Savitri Devi's paganism was a very modern philosophy of submersion in the purely physical, a biological materialism exalted to the status of a religion. Obviously, genuine Pagan philosophers with their own views of the transcendent dimension would hardly have recognized their own worldview in this reductionist quasi-Darwinism.
  • The Aryan Invasion Theory, along with the concomitant racialist understanding of the caste system as a kind of Apartheid system to preserve the Aryan's racial purity, was the alpha and omega of Savitri Devi's own worldview.
  • As for the Nazi connection, let us at any rate be clear about an easily verifiable fact: in so far as the Nazis cared about Indian history, they favoured the AIT. ... In fact, after reading her autobiography, “Memories and Reflexions of an Aryan Lady”, there is not the slightest doubt left that for her and her husband, their belief in the AIT, along with their distortive reinterpretation of Hindu tradition in terms of the AIT, was the direct cause of their enthusiasm for Hitler.
  • Christian Bouchet dismisses Goodrick-Clarke as a "pseudo-historian":... "Goodrick-Clarke has dispensed with all research work and has merely relayed Savitri Devi's own sayings without analysing or criticizing them." The problem is that this single source, her autobiography, is not supported by any independent evidence, and that she can easily have refashioned her past: "For the period from her birth until after World War 2, we have to trust Savitri Devi Mukherji for her life story. However, it is obvious that she herself has arranged her biography a posteriori in order to harmonize it with the themes defended in her books." ... At this point, one explanation becomes inescapable: "It is evident and very clear that Savitri Devi Mukherji has 'arranged' her biography in order to construct herself a persona apt to shine in the tiny circle of neo-Nazism"
    • Christian Bouchet about Savitri Devi's autobiography. Quoted from Elst, Koenraad. Return of the Swastika: Hate and Hysteria versus Hindu Sanity (2007), ch. 4.
  • [Perhaps] she developed her crassly racist views of inter-caste relations only later, projecting them back onto her Hindu activist period when she wrote her autobiography thirty-five years after the fact. My impression is that in the 1930s, she was much more moderate in this respect.
    • Koenraad Elst (2010). The saffron swastika: The notion of "Hindu fascism". Chapter 5.
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