Theos-Talk Archives (July 2006 Message tt00061)

In a message dated 7/5/2006 11:00:10 AM Central Standard Time,  
carlosaveline@terra.com.br writes:

I  would appreciate any commentaries -- and especially further 
bibliographical  evidences -- about the issue. 




It has been many years so I can't give you the exact month, but in 1925,  you 
will find that the Adyar Theosophist published a very long, two part article  
praising Mussolini's Italy.  
 
Now, you must understand the appeal of fascism in that period.   Europeans in 
particular were not used to the idea of popular democracy as we  understand 
the concept.  They had a very top-down view of how things should  be and the 
post WWI world was very confusing to them.  Leaders  mattered!
 
Given that, it is not surprising that Mrs. Besant, with her love of  
hierarchy and uniforms, would fall into that trap.  Rational thought,  critical 
thought was never her strong point.  
 
And this was not just confined to Europeans.  In the United States,  there 
was some pretty nasty eugenics legislation and some visual trappings that  
proved to be so embarrassing that you have to really dig into old movies to find  
them.  For example, in saying the Pledge of Allegiance, the practice was to  
start with the hand over the heart and then, at the phrase "to the flag" move  
the right hand out in an exact duplicate of the Nazi salute.  That  disappeared 
really fast in the 1930s, but the Roosevelt administration actively  
encouraged parades by industrial workers, (in the 1980s these folks were derided  as 
"the marching morons with shovels" as an explanation of why the Democrats  were 
having so much trouble) which looked terribly similar to Nazi parades, so  
similar in fact that German ambassador was said to have remarked that the only  
difference was that in Germany they wore swastikas.  Those disappeared too  
and it is actually rather hard to find newsreel footage of them.
 
Hitler was a great fan of Zane Grey western novels and Henry Ford's  
anti-semetic diatribe was one of his inspirations.
 
My point of all this is that given the culture of the time, it would not be  
surprising if there were an intersect between Nazi ideology and Theosophy.   
On the contrary, it would be surprising if there were not.  
 
Chuck the Heretic


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