Author: Koenraad Elst
Publication: Bharatiya Pragna
Date: February 2001
Introduction: New Age implies a
commitment to soft values, to harmlessness. By contrast, communism is a
dangerous enemy.
"New Age" is a (by now obsolescent)
container term referring to a galaxy of post-Christian religious groping,
with various sources of inspiration including humanistic psychotherapy,
Hindu-Buddhist meditation, Sino-Japanese "gentle" martial arts, Tantric-Taoist
transformation of sexuality, astrology, holistic medicine, and some more.
Its cradle was undoubtedly the late-19th century Theosophical Society,
which conjoined religious syncretism to esotericism on the, one hand and
liberal idealism on the other. (...) Theosophy generated much bizarre metaphysics,
absurd pomp and petty factionalism, but it also exerted a surprisingly
invigorating effect within the lives of many adherents. And its political
influence, too, appears to have been largely benign; Theosophy allied itself
not just with moralizing personal betterment but also with pacific internationalism
and the self-determination of colonized 'natives'." (Frederick Crews: "The
consolation of Theosophy", part 2, New York Review of Books, 3-10-1993)
Yet, this movement is accused of being the cradle of National-Socialism.
The alleged Nazi angle of the New
Age movement is a favourite theme of Communist scholars looking for crypto-
Nazis to "expose", and for ways to reduce every debate to an "anti-fascist"
issue (reduction ad Hitlerum) in order to recreate forever the moral power
equation of the 1940s when democratic anti-Communists like Churchill were
forced to support Stalin; and of Evangelicals trying to score points against
competitors on the religion market. Thus, on an Evangelical website I found
a jubilant review of a book by a German Marxist, Peter Kratz, which uses
all the tricks to amalgamate the New Age phenomenon with Nazi ideology:
Die Gotter des New Age, Elefanten Press, Berlin 1994. To Christian peddlers
of this book full of Communist deceit and hate, who effectively pretend
ignorance of Peter Kratz's ideological moorings, I may point out that he
frequently cites Lenin, murderer of millions of Christians, as his doctrinal
point of reference.
As one example of his amalgamation
technique, the opening paragraph describes the presence of both grim neo-Nazis
and mild New Age types at the Externsteine (Germany's counterpart to Stonehenge)
during summer solstice: "Long ago, someone has hacked out a cell in one
of the rocks, and a hole in the cell's front wall [through which the rising
sun's first ray will fall], no one knows when. For neo-Pagans and esotericists,
Nazis and New-Agers, it was the ancient Germanics who did it." (p.11) Though
the question is in itself apolitical, and though there would be nothing
wrong with Germanic authorship of the solstice hole (except for anti-Germanic
racists), Kratz uses it to put Nazis and New-Agers in the same corner,
as he will continue to do throughout his book.
In this case, he is simply wrong:
while Nazis may attach great importance to ethnic identity and often claim
Germany as the Indo-European Urheimat, the free wheeling spiritualists
whom he labels "New-Agers" care little about it. They generally accept
the conventional wisdom about such historical details, i.e. that the solstice-hole
at the Externsteine, like Stonehenge, was probably pre-Germanic, either
Celtic (the southern half of Germany, like England, had been Celtic before
being germanicized) or more likely pre-Celtic and pre-Indo-European, or
what Nazis would call "non-Aryan". Many Pagan remnants in the European
landscape are "Old European" dating back to before the Indo-European invasion
from the east, and New-Agers generally prefer the purportedly matriarchal
Old Europeans to the patriarchal Indo-Europeans.
Like many contemporary "anti-fascist"
publications, Kratz's book has as its single aim to damage as many people
and movements as possible by tainting them with Hitler connotations. Laird
Wilcox, an American anti-racist activist of long standing who got tired
of the verbal hate crimes committed in the name of anti-racism, writes
of antifa "watchdog" groups that they "are aggressively hostile and have
as their specific mission to defame, degrade and ultimately destroy their
opponents. For Watchdogs, there is nothing to debate and the only issue
of real significance is how much harm they can inflict on their enemies".
In Wilcox' experience, their methods to "ostracize targeted individuals
and groups" include "establishing 'links-and-ties' (i.e. footnoted guilt
by association), discerning their 'hidden agenda' and 'true motives" (L.
Wilcox: The Watchdogs: a Close Look at Anti-Racist " Watchdog " Groups,
Olathe KS 1999, quoted by reviewer Frank Miele, Skeptic, 2000/1, p.92).
This applies quite neatly to Kratz's book.
His argumentation follows the typical
pattern of conspiracy theories: "Mr. A is a member of club B, he also met
Mr. C who knows Mr. D, therefore Mr. D is an accomplice of club B". (Marcel
Hulspas and Jan Willem Nienhuys: Tussen Waarheid en Waanzin, Een Encyclopedia
der Pseudo-Wetenschappen. Scheffers, Utrecht 1997, entry Grote Samenzwering,
i.e. "great conspiracy", p. 138.) Thus, after citing some "tree of life"
imagery from recent New Age writings, which in turn refer to the tree as
a favourite cosmic symbol of the Native Americans, he reveals that tree
imagery was also used by racist and nationalist ideologues in the 19th
century and even by a Nazi biologist, who elsewhere also ranted against
the Jews, ergo to talk of trees is Nazi and racist. After all, when you
hear Stamm (tree's trunk), "the notion of Ab-stamm-ung [descent, genealogy]
readily comes to mind"! (p. 165) From tree to blood line to eugenic massacres:
by this free association, a sick Communist mind can turn the most innocent
piece of greenery into a Nazi gas chamber. "This way, Kratz can blacken
every premodern culture as fundamentally Nazi, for practically all peoples
use tree symbolism, from the Germanic Yggdrasil (meaning" Odin's horse"
and being an "ash-tree whose roots and branches join heaven and earth and
hell",- Concise Oxford Dictionary, 7thed., OUP, Delhi 1996, entry Yggdrasil)
to the Jewish Etz-Chaim, "tree of life".
While we are at it, let us note
that symbolism from the Jewish mystical tradition (Qabala) is an integral
part of Theosophical and New Age syncretism. By contrast, if you visit
anti-Jewish websites, you will find "qabalistic" used as a term of contempt
encapsulating the alleged Jewish secretiveness and deceitfulness. Since
anti-Semitism was the core concern of the Nazi movement it should be obvious
that the respect which Theosophists and New-Agers pay to the Jewish tradition,
and the carefree innocence with which they incorporate it into their syncretism,
are decisive arguments against the alleged Nazi agenda of these movements.
But even where Kratz makes valid
points about ideas allegedly held in common between alleged Nazis and New-Agers
(holism, organicism, environmentalism, animal protection), these fail to
prove his main thesis, viz. "that New Age and fascism are identical in
essential ideological components and that both serve, in their similar
objective practical consequences, the interest of capital". (p.31; Kratz
even opposes the common belief that the Nazis merely "misused" ideological
elements of holistic or theosophical thought: in his view, the Nazis made
a logical use of elements which are intrinsically identical to Nazi thought,
which implies that if New-Agers were to come to power, they would only
be consistent with their beliefs if they re-enacted the Nazi crimes. This
is an interesting case of how Marxists fight back against rather than ride
the wave of, New-Age-related trends like environmentalism. Clearly, Kratz
has provided inspiration to N. Goodrick-Clarke's vilification of environmentalism
in his book Hitler's Priestess.)
Thus, it may well be true that Romantic
love of nature was or is a trait of both the New Age philosophy and of
the personal philosophy of some Nazis; but it is unclear how that would
be a ploy to serve capitalism, and more importantly, it fails to confer
the really important traits of National-Socialism onto the New Age movement.
If Hitler's name has become a synonym of horror, it is not because he passed
laws to protect rare flora and fauna species.
Kratz's design is to show that certain
New Age themes or mere buzz-words (e.g. "holism") were already used by
fascist or otherwise rightist people, and then to deduce the grim warning
that if we let New Age people continue to do their thing, we will all land
up in Auschwitz. But this is obviously untrue. Whatever similarities Kratz
may discover or invent, New Age at the very least differs from National-Socialism
in the one respect which explains Auschwitz: it rejects violence. That
the Nazis killed many people was not due to their penchant for animal protection,
but to their belief in the rightness of violence.
Thus, "holism" was a term launched
by the Afrikaner politician Jan Christian Smuts (as discussed by Kratz,
p. 150) in his book Holism and Evolution, 1925, a worthy precursor of the
New Age recuperation of modern science by spirituality, e.g. Frithjof Capra:
Tao of Physics, 1975. Smuts was a racist in the paternalistic sense (Rudyard
Kipling's 44 white man's burden"), like most non-Nazi Europeans then were,
but not in the destructive Nazi sense. Contrary to Kratz's claim (p. 167),
Smuts was an opponent of the Afrikaner Nasionale Party which -was to institute
Apartheid after its election victory in 1948.
The one ideological choice of National-Socialism
(and even more of Communism) which was crucial in making its mass-murders
possible, was its glorification of armed struggle, its readiness to pursue
its political goals over numerous dead bodies. That is a decisive difference
with the much-maligned "New Age" movement, which, if nothing else, is certainly
a pacifist movement.
Having worked in a New Age bookstore,
organized some New Age events and attended many more in my twenties (after
my Marxist and before my skeptical period), I know the type: perhaps a
bit narcissistic, perhaps intellectually sloppy, but quite well-meaning
and at any rate mild and harmless. Possible wolves in the New Age landscape
are at worst charlatans, conmen, swindlers, but not mass-murderers. Precisely
this thorough non-violence explains the conspicuous syncretism of the New
Age scene: all traditions and innovations are deemed worthy of existing,
something Worthwhile is assumed to operate in all of them, none should
be fully rejected, let alone exterminated. It is, on the part of Peter
Kratz, a despicable calumny to impute a Nazi mentality and Nazi designs
to the New Age people.
And it doesn't stop there. Among
other fundamental differences, a relevant one for this political discussion
pertains to authority: in contrast with the Nazi "leader principle", the
New Age movement is anti-authoritarian. Its defining principle is precisely
that everyone is free to explore and experience whatever resonates with
him at that point in his evolution. Mostly in reaction against the suffocating
authority of Christian dogma, New Age people are freewheeling consumers
on the market of religions and lifestyles, accountable only to their "higher
selves", not to any political dictator. New Age is also multi-racial, mixophilic
and globalistic (which is why it is actually despised by the extreme Right,
a conspicuous fact which expert Kratz manages to overlook), it talks a
lot of community but is quite individualistic, and it dismisses the hypermasculine
bravery cult of the Nazis In favour of soft feminine values. It is about
as foreign to the regimented goose-stepping SS boots as you can get.
Today, most people in the New Age
scene, to the extent that they hold political opinions, cherish vestigial
Leftist attitudes. At the Anthroposophical schools, which have come under
fire because their founder Rudolf Steiner has made some racist remarks,
most parents are voters of the Green parties, which nowadays are explicitly
Leftist and pro-multiculturalist. If you scratch any (including non-Anthroposophical,
non-New Age) pre- 1945 authors deep enough, be sure to find some racism
or anti-Semitism. Recently, peripheral anti-Semitic passages were purged
from Agatha Christie's detective novels, and in the case of Shakespeare's
Merchant of Venice, such a whitewash would even make the plot unrecognizable;
but that is no reason to ban Shakespeare or Agatha Christie from our libraries.
Should Arabs ban the writings of Ibn Khaldun, or Jews those of Maimonides,
because somewhere buried in their influential works, they also wrote that
blacks are subhuman? Yes, Steiner held racist opinions, along with Voltaire
and Marx and Disraeli and most contemporaries, but it is morbid to reduce
his work to that quite peripheral aspect. And at any rate, in today's practice
there is simply no racism in Steiner-minded -circles.
Many of the similarities which Kratz
claims to have found are factual but harmless. It is quite true that the
New Age movement shared some elements with the Nazis, as did the Communists,
the New Deal socialists and many others; the question is which elements.
Even if it were true that New Age physicist Frithjof Capra shared with
disreputable racist ideologues a belief in "intuition" as a valid means
of knowledge (Kratz, p. 135, mentions Houston Stewart Chamberlain), this
would still not lead to the violent excesses of National-Socialism as long
as it didn't cross the threshold from principled non-violence to the self-righteous
acceptance of violence as the right method.
Let it for example be true that
some alleged Nazis, like some New-Agers, were inspired by a pantheism captured
in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's notion of "the cosmic Christ", as Kratz
shows of 1930s Nazi-related ideologues Herbert Grabert and Wilhelm Hauer.
(p.302) Heterodox Catholic philosopher Teilhard was very popular among
modern Christians as much as among New Age people (who are generally not
anti-Christian even if they object to Church authority); his idea of an
emerging convergence of the consciousness of all sentient beings in a future
"point Omega" brought the Christian notion of Salvation down into the course
of history, which to fringe ideologues like Wilhelm Hauer resonated well
with Adolf Hitler's notion of 14 providence", of a divine presence in history,
itself a non-theistic version of Biblical "salvation history", of God's
involvement in the history of His people. So what?
Numerous harmless dreamers have
entertained such ideas, they can not help it if some camp followers of
the Nazi movement also liked them. Vegetarians cannot help it if Hitler
too reportedly shunned meat; more pertinent is that the communities which
have practised vegetarianism for thousands of years, such as the Gujaratis,
have no record of genocide,- on the contrary, they have an extremely low
crime rate and are welcomed in the West as "model immigrants", forming
the very best argument against the xenophobic association of immigration
with disorder and violence.
Kratz's own Marxism did not share
many of the philosophical assumptions of the Nazis, yet it was similarly
(actually, ten times more) murderous. These Philosophical profundities
are just not the point. Whom should I rather encounter: a New Age dreamer
who paints Buddhist swastikas on the walls of his meditation room, or a
People's War Group Communist who has orders to eliminate the class enemies?
New Age can share with Hauer or
Chamberlain any amount of verbiage it wants; I still won't mind running
into a New-Ager in a dark alley. The reason is precisely that New Age implies
a commitment to soft values, to harmlessness. By contrast, Communism is
a dangerous enemy, even if its militants show knee-jerk reactions of hatred
when shown Nazi terms or symbols, because in spite of all its differences,
it shares with National-Socialism the crucial elements of self-righteousness,
subordination of human lives to political goals, and belief in violence
as the acclaimed motor of world history.
Peter Kratz's book is an evil book.
It obscures the crucial likeness between Hitlerian National Socialism and
Marxian International-Socialism while creating a smoke screen of immaterial
likenesses, mostly imaginary but anyhow unimportant even when real, between
ruthless National-Socialism and harmless New Age philosophies. Tainting
harmless and well-meaning people with the Hitler brush is unambiguously
evil, it is today the worst possible case of the one sin which all religions
condemn: calumny. To Christians who promote this hate literature, it may
be good to recall that diabolos/devil means "the calumniator".
(Sri Koanraad Elst is a Belgiun
writer and Indologist who has got vast knowledge about India and its problems.
This article is taken from his website.)
