Angry Planet - Magick as strategy in World War Two

Episode Date: January 24, 2017

Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, was obsessed with the occult. He attempted to read minds and used astrological star charts to inform his battle plans. On the allied side, English magician Aleister Crowley kept in contact with German occultists, fed them false information, and even created the V for Victory. Today on War College, we sit down with media theorist, documentarian and author Douglas Rushkoff to talk about the bizarre occult history of World War II and how it affected strategic decisions during the war. His latest book – Aleister & Adolf – is a historical fiction that tells the story of a strange ‘magickal’ battle between the Allies and Axis powers during World War II. It spans the globe, and connects Crowley, Hitler, General Patton, Heinrich Himmler and even Ian Fleming – the creator of super spy James Bond.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. The Allies understood that Hitler was very committed to an occultist strategy, where he used all sorts of magical elements. to make his military strategies.

On today's War College, a British double agent feeding the Nazis bad astrological charts? You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of a world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Matthew Galt. Hello, welcome to War College. This is your host, Matthew Galt. With us today is media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff. Rushkoff has written novels, comic books, and nonfiction works. He's produced documentaries for PBS, lectured at Google, and warned of the dangers of social media. Today, he's here to talk to us about Alistair and Adolf, a comic book about the occult conflict underpinning World War II. It stars General Patton, Rudolph Hess, and James Bond

creator Ian Fleming, and it's true, mostly. Douglas Rushkoff, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, thanks for having me. So I want to start off by explaining one of the central figures of this story, famed British occultist, Alist Aalister Crowley. Could you tell our listeners who he was and why he was important to the Allied war effort? So Alistaira Crowley was, you know, the classic British occultist, maybe the preeminent and archetypal one. He, you know, climbed mountains.

He did yoga. He had somewhat abusive relationships with women and self-abusive relationships. with drugs. And he was very much about finding other dimensions and other beings and mapping the terrain of the psyche and getting in touch with his own will. His motto was, you know, do what thou wilt should be the whole of the law, meaning you have to really find your will and then learn to express that will. He was, you know, he was considered the, you know, the beast, they called him. You know, the darkest most evil man in the world. And that's really just because people didn't understand what he was about

and also because he didn't really shy away from people thinking of him that way. The more afraid people were of him, the more power he had in a certain respect. Less known, I think, to the general public was that he was involved in both World War I and World War II as a propagandist. And World War I is kind of a double agent, ultimately on the side of the allies. America and trying to help get America behind the war effort. Right. He was actually in America during World War I working for a pro-German newspaper, but attempting to make it appear ridiculous from the inside. Yes, he was. Well, he did a lot of

things, but but his main, his main job really was to get American citizens behind behind the war effort. Because as you know, Woodrow Wilson ran on a peace platform and ended up, really, that's when public relations was invented by guys like Ed Bernays and the Creole Commission

was really to get America behind the war when they were elected a president to keep them out of the war. But in World War II, he was much, much older, and he got involved in more occult disinformation, if you will.

The allies understood that Hitler was very committed to an occultist strategy, where he used star charts and all sorts of magical elements to make his military strategies. And Alistair Crowley was enlisted in the effort to divert or distract Hitler with bad information. So, you know, and this is all just factual, but he worked. with Crowley worked with Ian Fleming, you know, the famous 007 author, to get falsified star charts into the hands of Hitler through Hitler's astrologers. And these would be star charts that were designed to really encourage Hitler to take certain kinds of military moves at certain times based on astrology because he thought, you know, the stars would favor certain actions.

And, you know, a host of other stuff, which, you know, I only found out about as I did deeper research when I found out that, oh, you know, Alastair Crowley came up with the Vias for Victory's salute that Winston Churchill used and wrote all of this, you know, poetry and, you know, incantations, really, for the British populace. And that they weren't realizing that these were magic spells so much. And I don't even really know, and this is sort of the point of the graphic novel, I don't even know that there needs to be any occult, you know, magical or supernatural power to these things for them to be have been effective as propaganda as public relations you know the same way that facebook now has its little thumbs up icon or that any corporation might use the same

sorts of propaganda techniques to promote their own agendas okay so there's a lot to digest there the first thing that jumps out at me is ian fleming really ian fleming really Ian Fleming was a, depending on how you categorize these things, MI5, most likely. And even, you know, the character, well, there are a couple of characters, but one of the characters who many people believe that 007 was based on, was also in the same little group of practicing magicians that Ian Fleming and Crowley was in. And they were, you know, on the one hand, people were interested in all this stuff,

as parlor tricks. You know, you'd go in, you'd just say the way maybe in the 20s or 30s in America, you see people going to, you know, the masons and, you know, doing weird rituals or, you know, the skull and bones. You know, there are all these secret societies that have these very complex rituals.

And, you know, usually we think of them just as sort of as hazing or as a way to make sure everybody feels like they're part of some wonderful, weird, dramatic thing. But when these folks are doing it, whether it's the Golden Dawn or one of these other occult societies are doing it, they're seeing it as much more real. They're seeing these as practices, either as ways to get their own minds into a higher state or to actually penetrate one of the seeming boundaries of reality and get into another zone. And that's really the question that I keep looking at. And that's really the

question that I keep looking at and that I look at in this book is, is the magic real? Are they doing something supernatural when, you know, when Crowley makes a sigil, which is a kind of a logo that's created through a ritual and then disseminates that logo, that sigil. Is something magical happening? Or is it more of a psych out? Is it more like, okay, Hitler believed that the swastika had actual power, that the symbol itself, as it replicates, has power. Now, it certainly has effect. You know, if people see a swastika coming, just like when people see the skull and crossbones of a flag on a pirate ship, that doesn't make you smile. It makes your heartbeat fast. So is it a magical symbol that makes your heartbeat fast, or is it just your associations with that?

That symbol has been invested with power by all of the pirates who are willing to fight under it. So that's sort of the question that I'm looking at. What is real and what is a psych out? And then for me, the interesting thing is how did these technologies then, I call them technologies, how did these techniques of influence end up trickling down to us, even after the war? What sorts of techniques that we learned in World War II ended up being used by the advertising industry or by marketers. And what happens when those techniques then migrate online into the world that we're living in today? The way you establish the conflict in this book is interesting.

It makes it seem like a fight between brands, right? The V versus the swastika. Mm-hmm. Right. Brand Hitler and brand England, if you will, exactly. And that Hitler did have a brand. Now, the thing, the difference is, and this is what I try to articulate in the book, is that, that the German style or the Nazi style of magic required the sacrifice of millions of human beings. You know, most people still don't understand what the heck Hitler was doing when he was killing all these Jews and other and other dissidents in gas chambers. You know, it wasn't just a cleansing of his master race. It was also, as far as Hitler was concerned, it was a magical ritual that with the millions of people being burned

in that sacrifice came tremendous power. And that the Nazis took it as real. They saw it as a black magic ritual. And Crowley and the Western magicians were very against that. Because they saw black magic as this evil, horrible thing.

And what they were doing as white magic, as, you know, a more magic, an ethereal magic, a magic of the mind. So there's a, the protagonist in this story, who's not real, is a young army photographer who's sent to England by Patton in order to enlist Patton's effort to get back the spear of destiny. It's one of those ancient artifacts that Hitler grabbed very early in the war,

and he believed it gave him, you know, an invincibility to win battle. So I have Patton, who was part of the force that actually, you know, retrieved the spear in real life. I have him send this young guy there. And the young guy is trying to figure out this young army lieutenant is trying to figure out what is real and what's not. And he ends up believing that Hitler's magic is more powerful than Crowley's, that actually killing people, you know, creates a magical power that all. of the propaganda in the world won't really undo. Actually, one of my favorite scenes in the book is when the kid first meets Patton, and Patton is holding the saber and he says something of the effect of,

if you can get your enemy to look at where you're pointing your sword, they've already lost. Yeah, which is actually something that Patton was talking about. I mean, Patton was a big, I mean, your listeners would know. Patton was a big swordsman, and he designed the last sword that was issued, I guess to, it must have been to the cavalry at that point. There was a fighting sword that he developed. Yeah, but he understood propaganda and distraction and how it works both in a sword battle

with just one person and how it would work in an overall war. That it's not cheating to psych out your opponent. You know, I had an eye-st offense, and I had a fencing teacher who told me in a, fighting this guy who was much bigger than me and I shouldn't have been and he said lose a point whack him in the head and I did I whacked the guy right I mean it got out there whack the guy right on the top of the head lost the point because it's a foul you know you know and ended up winning the match because the guy was just like who is this crazy little kid what is what is this guy going to do

so you know that's sort of the that's part of it you know that's and and anyone who thinks it's not is is nuts. And it's part of it too for the civilians that are involved. But that's really what the war that I'm looking at here is if World War II was indeed an ideological battle and a psychout battle, if it was in some ways Churchill against Hitler for the upper edge in this brand war, then what went into that? And how did that trickle down to us? How is that playing out now? I want to circle back around to the Nazis and the occult. This is something that's been written about extensively, and what you learn depends on who you read.

Some sources say that Hitler, and certainly people like Himmler and Hess, were very into the occult. Other sources say that Hitler abhorred the occult and even cracked down on it later. Can you speak to that? Well, they crack down on the occult they didn't like. I mean, you know, when they came into power, they, I don't know the names of the organizations here, but they shut down all of the,

all of the temples that weren't their own. You know, they killed Crowley's followers or put them in the camps, and not just because they were Crowley's, but because they weren't part of the new, you know, the Bureau of Witchcraft that they had invented. At the same time, you know, I found a lot of evidence from Hitler's advisors that they weren't actually occultists, that they didn't actually believe in the occult,

but that they knew that the British did. and that they were doing things to frighten the British into thinking that they had some occult leverage over them when actually it was all for show. And, you know, I don't really, I don't believe that. I think if anything, it was more the other way around that as the British realized just how committed to the occult that the Nazis were, they knew that if they could infiltrate the occult, that they could steer him in particular ways. You know, and they did get Rudolph Hess to, you know, to fly to Scotland, you know, believing that they were going to sign some kind of a peace treaty with him. You know, we do have evidence that through the occult societies and occult connections, that the British were able to make a serious dent.

You know, there were military moves that Hitler made that were based on Crowley's star charts. You know, that they were based on any star charts at all is fascinating. But they were based on falsified ones, a means that we did have. we, meaning the allies, did have some effect. Can you tell us about Rudolph Hess, kind of who he was and what his connection was with the occult? Yeah, I mean, well, Rudolph Hess was, in some sense, he was the deputy, you know, the deputy right.

He was, you know, as I researched, it turned out he was much more powerful than I previously thought. But he was originally in a magical lodge that was associated with Crowley. So, you know, they were essentially magical, magical, magical cussies. colleagues who ended up, you know, on the opposite side of the war. And Rudolph Hess was part of the SS that, that, who, who, uh, shut down the Crowley affiliated lodges or, or Covens and put those folks, you know, put those folks away. So when, you know, Crowley was part of an effort that, really, that Fleming, that Fleming

ran to get Hess to England on false pretenses. They got him to fly a plane over to Scotland where he thought he was going to meet with Crowley. And instead he was interrogated by, you know, by British intelligence. And after they didn't really get anything from him, there's a lot of evidence, although it's not certain that they let Crowley interrogate him. Crowley apparently interrogated him with mescaline, you know, which is a strong psychedelic drug. And then Hess went not after that. But apparently they didn't really get good information from Hess and all that. That Hess was more, you know, upset at having been, you know, having been fooled into going over there, but, and then being captured, but they didn't actually, you know, find out so very much.

One of the things I think is really fascinating about this book is how much of it is true, how much of it is demonstrably true. And so much of it is, as you and, or Grant Morrison, I think, say in the introduction, is about how you connect the dots. So I'm wondering, what were your primary sources for this? Who were you reading? Gosh, I mean, I read almost everything I could get my hands on that had to do with. I didn't read traditional World War II stuff because that usually dealt with generals and battle plans and things like that.

So, I mean, I ended up, there was one book called, what was you called, like Secret Agent Six66, which was, you know, three-quartered. of it or more was about Alastair Crowley and World War I. But then there were a brief section near the end about what Crowley's involvement in World War II and I used

that in those footnotes then to go out into all the other sources I could find. But it was largely Crowley biographies, Fleming biographies, most of the occult stuff on the Nazis was on the

sort of the Nazi side of it. But it was it was still interesting to see, you know, they're really the dark stuff that they did that, you know, makes America's MK Ultra look like, you know, child's play, you know, with the stuff they, the kinds of experiments they did, with hookers and Jews and convicts and, you know, sewing things into their bodies and then really trying to distinguish between

what was medical research and what was something else. You know, understanding human beings' pain threshold has limited medical value at a certain point. You know, they're not looking at anesthesia. They're looking at something else. So, you know, I started to look at which sorts of experiments seem to be scientific in nature and which seem to have other purposes. Some of Churchill stuff, it was more, for me, it was more interesting to look at daily newspaper coverage of these things. And you'll see, oh, look, they're putting all of these little poems. You know, they put poems every week or more, you know, encouraging poems for the people about how we're going to win the war and England stand fast and, you know, stand against the enemy.

And all of these light things that you don't really see written about so much in the history books, but then you'll see that some of these are Crowley's poems. So you've got, you know, an occult British magician writing poetry that's ending up in the morning newspaper as, you know, with little flowers and decorations. around it as the encouraging affirmations for the the the English public to read while they're getting bombed so Crowley is the central figure of this book he towers over the whole thing but so does adoff his name is right there in the title but the only picture of him is on the front was it a conscious choice to keep him in his image out and just have him haunt the work yeah i mean on a certain level I wanted it to be clear that Hitler, the character, doesn't really matter.

I mean, partly, yeah, we're on Crowley's side in this, or certainly on the British side and American side in this. And I didn't want to humanize Hitler because I didn't see him as a human being with intention, but I wanted Hitler to be the sigil of Hitler or the sigil of the Nazis. So this is really more a battle of how do we fight the swastika? You know, how do we fight that really as the sigil that we're fighting against more than Hitler himself? And also, Hitler as a character is he's not interesting to me as a character because first we've seen him so much. It's so hard to even show him without it being a satire on some level or some kind of a caricature.

and it diminishes the power because the real power was the way that it was the memetic power of the Nazis, which is why it's sort of interesting today when we see, you know, the alt-right and the neo-Nazi movement using mimesis, more than they are traditional propaganda. We're seeing these same magical techniques reemerge, you know, the alt-right using Pepe the Frog. And if you look online, the actual, the magical rituals and incantations that are around him, the, you know, the stated intent of this stuff to disseminate memetically really comes all the way back from these much earlier uses of memes and decentralized magic to promote the cause. You dived right into a topic that I hoped you would, and that's what you see is the central message of this book. We've been dancing around it the entire time, but I think you just put it. your finger on it. Can you explain a little bit more? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. What I was

really writing about in this book was the way the memetic, propagandistic and magical techniques of hot war propaganda ended up migrating from the battlefield into marketing. You know, So that in a sense, I'm saying the fascists won the war. You know, even though the Nazis lost, the magical techniques ended up being used on our populations. So the same sorts of magical techniques that were used to charge the Nazis swastika or Winston Churchill's Vias for Victory sign end up being used to charge the logos of corporations today. And that the, you know, so the war industry became the culture industry. You know, and the oddest thing about it, I mean, I wrote this book. I wrote it about four years ago, and it just took this long for it to get drawn and published,

is that what we've seen over the last year, really, is those cultural techniques migrate back over into politics. So, you know, we see it was really, you know, reality TV and American Idol, which created the bridge. for the values of consumerism to trickle down or over into citizenship. So now most Americans can't really distinguish between their roles as consumers and their roles as citizens. Well, you make a purchase or you vote for a candidate. As if your vote for a candidate is the same as picking which contestant on American Idol you want to win the contest. as if it's some statement of personal belief and self-expression rather than a tool for enabling civic function to go on.

What do you think it was about World War II that was so ripe for this kind of thing to take place? Why did it come out of this specific war? Why didn't it happen in World War I or another war before that? Well, I mean, I feel like the wars before World War II were still basically family, squabbles between monarchs that happened to have control over armies. You know, it was these weird family fights and territorial disputes, these strange royal spats, whereas what preceded World War II was really a new, a new way of looking at the world.

You know, Mussolini was, you know, the proto-fascist. Mussolini was on the cover of Time magazine twice as a hero. You know, before he was an enemy. You know, Time Magazine and Hughes Idy and those folks, they thought this is going to be the answer for our labor problems. Is fascism, this works, where we're all part of this one thing, and it seemed to be the answer for the industrial age. So it was, it, World War II was much more a battle of ideologies.

So they seemed to be, World War II seemed to be the first war that was about the sort of mass psychology of a mass psychology battle over ideology. And because it was over ideology and belief, rather than your allegiance or patriotism to a particular king, it was much more than about mind control. It was more prone to these magical techniques. You know, we did see it a little bit, like we were saying. World War I in America, because America, we didn't have a king. How do you get America in a war in World War I when America was so committed to peace? Well, now we start using public relations. Now we start showing, you know, that's when you start showing pictures of the babies getting pulled from the incubators, you know, like in the Gulf War, the stuff that's not true. Now you want to move those hearts and minds

so that they'll follow you into the battlefield. You know, it's a different job. And it's from really from the tale of World War II onward, war had so much more to do with, with propaganda and siops, really, than it did with just getting your guys into the battlefield and, you know, running them with bayonets. All right, I'll bring this back around to the modern era. I want to ask you one more question. It feels as if America is now bad at this part of things, bad at propaganda. You know, I look at what the Islamic State produces.

and it's sleek and professional. They really understand their audience. What do you think about that? Well, we're living in a digital media environment, which turns out to be different from a television media environment. The television media environment in some ways is intrinsically unifying. It creates the sense of simultaneous witnessing of things around the whole world, whether it's the moon landing or the Olympics or even the beginning of the Gulf War when those guys from the CNN were in that hotel room and the whole world watches those first bombardments.

There was a sense of collectivism of one planet going through this stuff. The Internet, in spite of the fact that it feels so global, the Internet is actually very local. It's not global in its bias. It's much more walled and individualized. You know, at the height of the television era, Ronald Reagan can say, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. At the height of the internet level,

the height of the internet era, we get Donald Trump saying, let's build a wall. And that's because digital technology is discreet. It's either here or there, one or zero. It's like a snap two grid. Everything has a boundary, a division. Are you from here?

Are you from there? So when you see the kinds of revolutions that happen in a television era, they're very global in the way that they feel. Like the Czech Republic will now join the global community or join NATO and leave this one side of the world and join this other big side of the world. The American president is the leader of the free world. So there was this hands around the world kumbaya-like. progressive agenda to television that the internet just doesn't have. And the internet is much more like Arab Spring is much more promoting of nationalist-boundaried understandings of self. You know, the Arab Spring was not a global movement. It was a national movement. It was,

what is Egypt? The Brexit is an internet-style movement. It's nationalist. It's what makes us different from the Euro and the rest of the European community. And in, America now. You get, even the, the, the, in ascendance are much more nationalist kinds of sensibilities rather than the globalist ones. So it is going to favor much more of a decentralized ISIS-like understanding of the world and the retrieval of the caliphate. I mean, what's the other main property of digital media is memory. The whole thing is built on memory. Even the processing goes on in memory. So it's no wonder that the bias of our fascinations are about recalling things, retrieving things, make America great again, bring back the caliphate. All of these very old ideas

end up, you know, retrieved and re-emerging in a digital space. So it's very hard to promote a unified globalist universal agenda. And the way, I would argue, the way to fight against the more dangerous forms of nationalism or ISIS or Arab nationalism in this media space is locally, not nationally, is help to promote local and felt alternatives. You know, you promote, you promote, how are you connected to your community. And you have to think of your real on-the-ground communities as the most resilient entities in such a struggle rather than your kind of giant abstracted nation states, which really don't mean that much to people in the long run. You know, we understand those of us who've read history that nation states are really the first artificial construct. People lived in city states,

which were then kind of artificially connected into these nation states that don't feel so real. You know, even in America, you'll see people talk about states rights over federal rights and that uncomfortable feeling people have about the federal government getting involved in their business. And that's because they understand they have this feeling like the federal government is an abstraction, that it's not real, that they can't understand what I'm going through right here in my community on the ground. So I think we need to promote a kind of more grassroots bottom-up local sensibility that will end up much more resilient and better able to resist the pull of these more personalized ideological magnets that are really drawing a heck of a lot of our people toward them. Douglas Rushkoff, thank you so much. The book is Alistair and Adolf.

It's put out by Dark Horse. Check it out. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College is the brainchild of Jason Fields and Craig Hecht. Matthew Galt hosts the show and Books the Guests. The show is produced by me, Bethelhabte. If you like War College and want to show your support, subscribe to us on iTunes and leave us a rating and review there.

It very much helps other people find the show. If you have any comments or suggestions for future shows, we are happy to hear them on Twitter. We're at war underscore college. Thanks.