Behind the Bastards - CZM Rewind: Part One: Savitri Devi The Woman Who Turned Nazism into a Religion

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus to discuss Hitler's Priestess, Savitri Devi. Jamie’s new Cool Zone Media show Sixteenth Minute launches on May 7th! Every week, she gets to know one of the internet�...��s most notorious main characters, and how the algorithm delivering them to you changes their brain and yours. Up first: Antoine Dodson, the dress, and Boston slide cop! Sources: Hitler's Priestess Twitter Photo Savitri Devi: The strange story of how a Hindu Hitler worshipper became an alt-right icon Why white supremacists and Hindu nationalists are so alike The Man Who Brought the Swastika to Germany, and How the Nazis Stole It Ritualistic Cat Torture Was Once a Form of Town Fun The Great Cat Massacre: French History Revealed by the Americans Savitri Devi: The mystical fascist being resurrected by the alt-right Hitler is Homeless in Vienna THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CULT EXPERIENCE  HINDUISM AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM Priestess of Hitlerism: Savitri Devi The Death of Adolf Hitler Savitri Devi Wiki Savitri Devi From Christchurch to India: How India’s RSS Inspires White Nationalist Violence Feuerkrieg Division (FKD) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Oh, hi, I'm Rachel Zoe and my podcast Climbing in Heels is back and better than ever. You might know me from the Rachel Zoe project or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist. And guess what? I'm still just as obsessed with all things fashion, beauty and business. Climbing in Heels is all about celebrating the stories of extraordinary women and this season is here to bring you a weekly dose of glamour, inspiration and fun. Listen to Climbing in Heels every Friday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Danielle Moody here, host of the Woke F Daily podcast. We've been with iHeart for a year and what a year it has been. As we head deeper into 2024 and yet another life-changing election cycle, Woke AF Daily is here to keep you sane and woke.
Starting point is 00:00:46 Make Woke AF Daily your podcast destination for 2024 election news and analysis. Listen to Woke AF Daily Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I used to have so many men. How this beguiling woman in her 50s. She looked like a million bucks. Scams a bunch of famous athletes out of untold fortunes. Nearly $10 million was all gone.
Starting point is 00:01:14 It's just unbelievable. Hide your money in your old Richmond because she is on the prowl. Listen to Queen of the Con, Season 5, The Athlete Whisperer on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's esoteric, my Hitlerisms? Shit, that is two Hitler starts in a row.
Starting point is 00:01:41 Ah, fuck it. Jesus, Robert. Well, it fits with this episode. This is Behind the Bastards, podcast about the worst people in all of history. I'm Robert Evans, I'm the host, and my guest today is Jamie. Hi, I just go by one name now. I'm the Beyonce of, no, Billy Wayne's the Beyonce
Starting point is 00:02:02 of Behind the Bastards. Yeah, you are the podcaster formerly known as the Beyonce of Behind the Bastards. Yeah. You are the podcaster formerly known as the Beyonce of Behind the Bastards. Yeah. You're the Beyonce of my heart. Thank you. Yeah, there we go. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:02:14 There we go. Jamie, how are you doing today? I'm good. I'm good. I think that that's true. I'm good. I have to add- Yeah, you're probably good.
Starting point is 00:02:24 I have to add a bag to my Spirit airlines flight, but that's about as as challenging as it's getting today Speaking of monsters that is the greatest monster of all pay to breathe on my interface Yeah, you have to like swipe your credit card if you sneeze on a spirit airlines I uh, I have this friend, his name is Lenny, and he listens to the podcast, so he may hear this. And Lenny is one of the most experienced travelers I know. And at one point I was taking a flight with him in Eastern Europe to Ukraine through Wizz Air, which is one of the worst airlines on the planet.
Starting point is 00:03:00 Oh, I've heard of Wizz Air. Yeah, they're terrible. Never had the pleasure. There was a moment where they started hassling us about our bags and it became clear that we weren't going to be able to like fit everything, like that we were going to have to take stuff out. And the line from him that I'll never forget was, I guess, well, I guess I'm wearing all my pants today. I've worn multiple pairs of pants on.
Starting point is 00:03:23 How, if you're not going onto a Spirit Airlines flight wearing five jackets, like what are you even, you're robbing yourself. You're, I've been on a Spirit Airlines red eye next to like an actively drunk person multiple times. Well, no, that's just normal. I know, but it's like, yeah, you're right. If you haven't wept,
Starting point is 00:03:47 if you haven't wept and thrown things away while waiting to get in line at Spirit Airlines, have you even flown? We've gotten off topic. Very off topic. Jamie. Yes. Have you ever heard of Savitri Devi? No.
Starting point is 00:04:07 Oh good. Oh boy, Jamie, you are in for a motherfucking treat. Ooh, I love when you don't tell me in advance. Okay, okay. Yeah. This is one I'm gonna guess almost nobody listening to has heard of, but she's one of the most important people
Starting point is 00:04:22 for understanding where we are right now in the year 2020. Like the most recent headline that ties directly to her is you remember when the FBI arrested all those members of the base? That neo-Nazi group that's planning to start a second civil war by randomly firing into a crowd in Virginia that was full of armed people? Yes. That whole hullabaloo? Yes. Yeah. Well, she's kind of behind all that although she died decades before it happened. So that's today's story nice
Starting point is 00:04:50 Let's do it So now Jamie we're gonna start like we start every good day by talking about our little buddy Shouldn't call him a buddy Adolf Hitler. Okay, it's weird because I can call Stalin a buddy But I feel like calling Hitler a buddy is a bridge too far. I don't know, on this show I feel like there are just rules that are different. Yeah, they're old friends at this point. So Hitler was at his core.
Starting point is 00:05:15 Who was he? He was a secular ruler, Jamie. He was not a, I think there's a lot of misconceptions about kind of the nature of, of his power and like his regime because of all of these, like history channel documentaries and this industry of books on Nazi occult history and like Nazi magic and the Hellboy movies.
Starting point is 00:05:36 But like- Oh, love to hear it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, they're great movies. At least one of them is, but like this idea that like- Haven't seen them. The Nazis were like full of, full of full of magic right and that Hitler like believed all sorts of like weird Kooky occult stuff about like raising the dead and and aliens and shit, and it's just not true
Starting point is 00:05:56 There were some funky occult ties to National Socialism, but they were to be phrase. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah cult ties Yeah, baby Oh, love that phrase. Oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah. Funky. Funky occult ties. Yeah, baby. Yeah, but they weren't to Hitler. They were to like kind of like side figures, like the B list of the Nazis. A lot of those guys were kind of into the occult, but like your A listers really were pretty secular guys.
Starting point is 00:06:19 The Beyonce's, the Nazi Beyonce's, as opposed to, I'm trying to think of like, the Halls. The Nazi Jeremy Renners. The Halls. Oh, how dare you speak his name in this forum. I thought we made a pact to never speak of him again. We never signed that contract. We never. But you did. It was under negotiation for a long time.
Starting point is 00:06:41 Yeah. It is still in arbitration. negotiation for a long time. Yeah. It is still in arbitration. Now the Tula society, spelled fool society, like the top racks on people's jeeps, was it, well, Subaru's, people's Subaru's. The Tula society was a German occult group in the early 20th century in Germany and it provided some of the early funding and leadership for the Nazi Party. Heinrich Himmler some of the early funding and leadership for the Nazi party. Heinrich Himmler held bizarre quasi magical beliefs for his whole time in power. And he was kind of into some weird, he thought he was like a reincarnated
Starting point is 00:07:12 prince and some shit. Sure. Hitler himself was not at all into a cult stuff. Um, and the only guy really close to him who was, was Rudolf Hess, who was his deputy and for a long time, his best friend. This is the guy he like co-wrote Mein Kampf with, like Hess and Hitler are like fucking tight before Hitler comes to power.
Starting point is 00:07:30 Is that like his ghostwriter? Yeah, kind of, like more like his muse. Yeah, and also the guy who was a competent typist. Both of those things. I mean, you got, if your muse is also a competent typist, who says the perfect person doesn't exist? Yeah, Rudolf Hess. That's what people say about Rudolf Hess, is he was the perfect person.
Starting point is 00:07:54 So he was also the deputy Fuhrer for a while. Oh, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick. Yeah, he was a cool dude. But he wasn't really in the picture for very long. He got increasingly marginalized after Hitler came to power in 33. And in 1941, he kind of went bug fuck and got on a plane and flew to Great Britain
Starting point is 00:08:17 while the two countries were at war. Sorry, sorry, sorry. How would you define bug fuck? I would define bug fuck as like independently hopping in your private plane and flying to a country that your country is actively bombing to try to parachute down and negotiate for peace between your two nations without anyone asking you to. I would describe that as pretty bug fuck. Yeah, that's not.
Starting point is 00:08:45 This is like a new term for me, and now this is the only reference point I have for it, so I'm not gonna know how to define bug fuck moving forward. Okay, so bug fuck is when the world is falling apart, and you're like, fuck it, and you go the fuck off, and then you, is that it? Kind of, yeah. It was the kind of where like there was no chance of it ever working He did not have the authority to to sign a peace treaty for Germany
Starting point is 00:09:13 And Britain did not have any interest in talking with him or making peace with Germany at this point sick So he basically just flew and crash landed in England and got arrested and spent the rest of his life in prison. Very bad. And it was a huge embarrassment for Hitler. Because this is like his right hand man who in the middle of the war flies to his enemy's country to try to negotiate without Hitler's approval. It was very weird.
Starting point is 00:09:41 And because Hess was like this occult dude into astrology and all this shit, and like this weird, he was actually kind of like a Buddhist, like he's a weird dude. Sick. But because he held all these weird beliefs and he pissed off Hitler so badly, Hitler bans like all of this weird occult shit that had cropped up around the Nazi party in 1941.
Starting point is 00:10:01 Okay. So, yeah. So after 41, like really most of that stuff is illegal. Heinrich Himmler gets up to a little bit of it with the SS because he's got a castle and he's just a weird dude. We'll get into some of that in the later episode. The important thing to understand is that like, yeah,
Starting point is 00:10:16 Hitler was like a distinctly not wooey guy. Like he's not a new age sort of dude. He's like a guy if you mention your, like if I, he's like the guys on Reddit who like, if you mention you so much as mention your zodiac sign, they're like, she's not credible. She's fine. She's a, she's lost it. Like, I love that type of person.
Starting point is 00:10:40 And I feel confident saying that a hundred percent of Hitler's biographers agree he would have been extremely on Reddit. More on Reddit than anyone has ever been on Reddit. Sure, yeah. No, he would be the most reddity guy of all of them and we have to admit that that is very, what's his sign? That's very his sign of him, wouldn't you say? I don't know.
Starting point is 00:11:09 He's such a Taurus. But he's such a Taurus. Sure. Okay, continue. I assume you're referring to the maker of really shoddy handguns, which I think they're Brazilian. Terrible guns. Taurus? Oh, okay. No, I'm just're Brazilian, terrible guns. Toro.
Starting point is 00:11:25 Oh, okay. No, I'm just trying to get canceled on the behind the bastards board. No, never, never, never advocating the Taurus sign or the Taurus firearms brand is not going to go well for you. Okay. Fair. Um, yeah, so now Hitler, so he's not into the occult at all. He's not a big fan of Christianity either. He felt it was fundamentally Jewish because Jesus was Jewish, which is, you know, not an irrational
Starting point is 00:11:53 point of view within the logic of being a Nazi. And he worried it weakened the German people, but he also respected Christianity for its ability to inculcate good values in the German people. And the primary good value it inculcated was making lots of babies, because most Germans were Catholic, and Catholics aren't big fans of condoms. I'm not sure if you're aware of that. No, I know.
Starting point is 00:12:17 I wouldn't have aunts if it weren't for this attitude. None of us would. Now, Hitler himself was a baptized Roman Catholic all his life. He probably didn't really believe much of anything other than that Hitler was a cool dude, but he felt it was important to maintain this image. Now, there were some among his followers that it was Nazism's destiny to become the new great German religion, but Hitler himself pushed back against this, insisting in Mein Kampf that national socialism, quote, is not a religious reform, but a political reorganization of the German
Starting point is 00:12:47 people. He believed, quote, it is criminal to try to destroy the accepted faith of the people as long as there is nothing to replace it. And it is possible that given enough time Hitler would have tried to replace Christianity with something else, but he never attempted to do so, and as far as we know the supernatural, as it's generally known, played very little role in the Nazi regime. But, and here's where the real episode starts. In the decades since Hitler shot himself in that bunker in 1945, Nazism has changed quite
Starting point is 00:13:16 a lot. The actual political and historic beliefs of the original Nazis and of Hitler himself have been twisted and shifted into something even weirder. It would be too much to say that this new form of Nazism is more dangerous than the original, given the tens of millions of people who died from the original Nazism. But it's probably accurate to say that the fact that Nazism has mutated into what we call esoteric Hitlerism has made it better able to survive in the era of the Internet. Now, esoteric Hitlerism is a term used to refer to a number of different strains of
Starting point is 00:13:48 post-war Nazi thought that put a bizarre religious and occult spin on Nazi racial theories and on Hitler himself, often seeing the man as essentially the avatar of a god. 4chan and 8chan are in the modern age two of the most prolific vectors for the spread of this brand of nonsense. Sure. There are strains of it in Brinton Terrence Manifesto and in Anders Breivik's Manifesto. Sure. And today, we're talking about the woman who invented all of this. The single person who became the living link between the Nazism that tried and failed to conquer Europe and the modern Nazi movement that spawns mass shootings and attempted mass shootings on a monthly basis today. Her name was Savitri Devi and she was a huge piece of shit.
Starting point is 00:14:28 This is someone's feminism somewhere. Yeah. This is some piece of shit's feminism. She is a feminist icon. She's a feminist icon. Feminism is the law now. Mm hmm. This is a woman who spent her whole life living alone with a pile of cats
Starting point is 00:14:43 and changing Nazism forever. Okay, well, what if she just did the first half, you know? She was not willing to do just the first half. She was like, okay, so I'm in a pile of cats. That's great. What else could I do? And that was her second idea. That's embarrassing. That was her second idea was Nazism. Hater. It does, she does start first focused on the cats and then move straight to Nazism though, it's, it's remarkable.
Starting point is 00:15:09 Yeah. So she was born, uh, Maximeani Portas, uh, on September 30th, 1905 in Lyon, France. Her mother, Julia came from Cornwall, the town with the 36th dumbest name in all of England. Her father's ancestry was a melange of various Mediterranean peoples without access to birth control. He was mostly Italian and Greek, although young Maximiani was born a French citizen, she latched onto her father's Greek ancestry from the very beginning. Some of this had to do with the fact that Leon had a large and
Starting point is 00:15:40 active Greek expat community and her dad was a prominent member of it. She also nursed an early fascination with Roman history. Her name, Maximian, was actually just the female form of Maximian, the proper first name of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. So she's a big old nerd. I really have to emphasize what a nerd she is. I feel like I've met versions of this girl in like sophomore English classes and they're like, actually something, something, and you're like, stop it, stop it. Please just like
Starting point is 00:16:10 finish reading their eyes. We're watching God. Let's move on. – I was the male version of this for a while. I mean, I took three years of Latin because I was such a Roman history nerd. – Okay, Robert, some of us took five years of Latin and do we remember a fucking thing? Of course not. – No, no, no. – Of course not. – Not a mystery nerd. Okay, Robert, some of us took five years of Latin and do we remember a fucking thing? Of course not. No, no, no. Of course not. Not a goddamn word. I liked it, like when I was in high school, like in junior high and high school,
Starting point is 00:16:32 if you were like in the quote unquote advanced classes, they would be like, let's teach them a language they can't use. I'm so stupid. Yeah. God damn it. Totally useless term. Did you have to use that? I mean, it's one of those. Wait, did you have to use that textbook that was about the Romani family? Did you do E use that? I mean, it's one of those. Wait, did you have to use that textbook that was about the Romani family?
Starting point is 00:16:46 Did you do Eke Romani? Oh, no, no, man. I was like fucking Chicilius and Quintus. I remember those names. They were like the fucking, it was like a bunch of Pompeii people who all died at the end of the book. Everyone died at the end of our textbook. That's the, wait, was it like the, we had the, we had the Cornelia family.
Starting point is 00:17:07 It was like Cornelia and her brother Marcus. And then they had a friend named Sextus who was a pest. They sound like fucking losers. They weren't, they were, well they actually were. It was fucking paecilius for me. They're, your family sounds way better because our family, there was like three books in total and the whole second book, so like all of eighth and ninth grade, they're just stuck in a ditch. They're like in a ditch,
Starting point is 00:17:30 their carriage is in a ditch, they can't get out, they're staying at an inn, the innkeeper's yelling at them, they're stuck in a ditch, they're stuck in a ditch for a whole month and then they go to Rome and everything is fine. That sounds like a nightmare. Well, yeah. Nightmare. Yeah, it was horrible. So, Maximiani would have gotten a lot, well, no, she wouldn't have. She would have been the most annoying person in our Latin class.
Starting point is 00:17:51 Ugh. Yeah. I don't like when people are in the Latin class and they're also like into it. I'm like, hmm, we should be learning a real language. I like that because you didn't have to learn to pronounce anything. You never had to speak it because there was no practical reason to speak it. Well, no one knows either. Like you've got ecclesiastical Latin, but there's no way to know if it was exactly the same
Starting point is 00:18:13 as what the Romans spoke. So we just didn't give a shit. It was great. Yeah, my teacher, Ms. Cook, would come and she would, what was the thing she would say? She was like, okay, discipuli et discipuli. Like she'd be like she was like, um, okay, discipule at this discipule. Like she'd be like, hello students, let's learn
Starting point is 00:18:29 Julius Caesar. And then we would just talk about how the family was stuck in the ditch all day. All day. Horrible. Yeah. Well, Maxime Onni spent her young life stuck in that ditch. And that ditch was called being a huge nerd for Mediterranean classical civilizations. Um, she was a strong-willed child which here is the synonym for unspeakably arrogant and a giant pain in the ass. She felt strongly about just
Starting point is 00:18:54 about everything. That is how they describe annoying children. Yeah, strong-willed. She was known to be utterly immovable once she'd latched onto an idea. One strong opinion she developed early was that British people were terrible, which is not inaccurate. She hated her mother's English friends and the way they prattled on about illnesses and their dying families. Harsh. Oh my God.
Starting point is 00:19:17 That's so harsh. They're like, I wish my family wasn't dying. She's like, shut up. Jesus Christ. Yeah. We get it. She's like, I wish my family wasn't dying. She's like, shut up. Jesus Christ, yeah. We get it. She didn't like French people very much either. And the particular cause for her hatred of the French
Starting point is 00:19:33 was the French Revolution. She read about it as a little girl in school and was instantly furious. The Republican ideals of equality, liberty, and fraternity disgusted her. She was punished at school for making an obscene gesture at a plaque of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. And again, she's like eight or nine. Yeah, she's like a fucking little kid at this point. That is so funny. Yeah. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, which small child Savitri Devi flipped off, includes such controversial takes as
Starting point is 00:20:03 people are innocent until proven guilty. People have the right to liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. And people should be able to speak and write with freedom. Wow, some real hot takes being thrown out there. Jeez, okay, so she was like, born to be harmful. She was born to be a fascist. As a small child she's like,
Starting point is 00:20:27 people aren't equal, what is this bullshit? That's so, the little flipping off to human rights, you do feel like we should have known. We should have known. I mean, I love flipping off old documents too, but to me it's the Magna Carta, and the Magna Carta knows why. The Magna Carta knows what she did.
Starting point is 00:20:48 Oh yeah. The Magna Carta shakes in her boots whenever you come walking by. The Magna Carta is a messy bitch, and I have no time for it. Okay Robert, gee, I can't believe you just called a female document a bitch. A messy.
Starting point is 00:21:04 You're setting a bad example. Robert, feminism is law now. Is this document misogyny? She's literally shaking right now. She's here. Oh no. She's in the room with me. You didn't tell me the Magna Carta was in the room today, Sophie.
Starting point is 00:21:20 She drove me here. Horrible. Well, I don't have a driver's license. I don't know a driver's license. I don't know what you want. I don't know how much further to take this bitch. So I'm just gonna. Later in life in 1978, Savitri Devi told an interviewer,
Starting point is 00:21:34 a beautiful girl is not equal to an ugly girl. So she remained pretty consistent about her belief in the fundamental inequality of human beings. Like her whole life basically. And she's getting really granular about it, too Yeah, yeah, okay. She's granular about fucking everything. Oh now no chief motivating factor in her childhood I have to say it was completely understandable She felt a deep powerful sense of rage at the abuse of animals by human beings
Starting point is 00:22:01 Okay, starting at age five. Yeah starting at age five. She began expressing to her parents' concern at the abuse of animals she witnessed in a daily basis. She was horrified by circuses, the fur trade, and the eating of meat. While still in elementary school, she became a committed vegetarian and eventually a vegan. Maximianni Portos was particularly disgusted by the abuse of cats by peasants on the French countryside. Her only real biographer, Nicholas Goodrick Clark claims this, quote, disgusted her and turned her against mankind. And since most
Starting point is 00:22:30 people listening probably don't know anything about the history of cat torture in Europe, I didn't know anything about the history of cat torture in Europe. I'm going to have to talk about that now for a little while. It's like a thing, Jamie. Oh no. Okay. So like specific to this region, cat torture? All of Europe, really, but like, yeah, specifically to this region cat torture all of Europe really but like yeah specifically to France like the French Hate cats. Okay. All right. I'm listening. They are assholes about cats. Okay. Yeah Today we rightly revere cats as our moral and intellectual superiors and we have organized our society around pleasing them
Starting point is 00:23:02 This is right and good but cats have not always been beloved in the West. While they are considered basically holy in Islam, they're like ritually clean, like you can have them in mosques and stuff all over the place, you don't have to wash your hands after touching them if you're going to go pray. There's a long Christian tradition of seeing cats as demonic entities. And to be fair, Islam is kind of shitty on the subject of dogs. So I guess whatever of the big religions you pick, you're gonna be terrible to one of the good animals.
Starting point is 00:23:28 I don't know why. Yeah, it's weird. Now in the 15th century, Edward, Duke of York, announced that if the devil inhabited any living animal, it was the cat. And for centuries, all around Europe, good Christians tortured and murdered cats for almost no reason.
Starting point is 00:23:44 In Ypres, Belgium, they held an event called Kattenstot, the festival of cats, which sounds awesome but actually just involved drunken townsfolk throwing cats from the top of the church onto hard cobblestones and then lighting them on fire. No! Kattenstot, yeah, yep. I hate, okay, it's always really frustrating when you hear a story about the underclass and it's like you're playing to stereotypes about the underclass.
Starting point is 00:24:07 Yeah. Don't throw cats on the pavement. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm gonna be honest, I bet the rich people got to go up first and throw the nicest cats. Just to set a good, yeah, and then, and then they would privately be throwing cats
Starting point is 00:24:21 at hard marble floors as well. Yeah. My God. It's horrible. And Cat & Stout still takes place in Ypres every May, but they use stuffed animals now, which just stop. Just stop. It's not a good tradition. It would be so easy to not do it.
Starting point is 00:24:37 It would be so easy. Do they eat the cat? Or is it just, we're just killing the cats? Not that that makes it better. Oh no, no, they're just murdering cats for no good reason. Okay, that's it's fun That is worse and people are horrible. But Jamie, you know who doesn't randomly torture cats in Belgium Your sponsors you know that exactly right? Sophie vets every sponsor to make sure they do not torture cats in Belgium. Yes.
Starting point is 00:25:05 Is that, that's true? That's Robert is a lie. Robert. I, okay. Okay. It is a small country, so the vetting is pretty easy. Like you'll notice I did not say, for example, Canada. No, you certainly didn't. True bastard.
Starting point is 00:25:20 No, I did not. Canada. Wow. Canada just got canceled before our very eyes. Products. Products. Do you think Abuelita Knows Best? We know about the drama here,
Starting point is 00:25:36 executive producer of the podcast, Dave My Abuelita First. And we definitely do. Join us while our host, Pico Ortiz, and our Abuelita Liliana Montenegro play matchmaker for you loving hopefuls out there. Pico? Yes, yes Wilmer.
Starting point is 00:25:52 We are ready for another wild ride. Listen, every Thursday as Abuelita Liliana and I meet three single cuties who will vie for a date with one lucky dater. Except, to get their heart, they have to win over Abuelita first. How PG is this? Not at all, totally are. Abuelita's here so bring it. Through speed dating rounds, hilarious games and AI, Abuelita's intuition, one
Starting point is 00:26:18 contestant might be lucky enough to become the perfect match. Let's see if Chispas will fly or if these singles will be sent back to the dating apps. Listen today my Abuelita first as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What up? I am Drammo's host of the Life as a Gringo podcast. Now this is a show for the no sabo kids, the 200 percenters. Here we celebrate your otherness and embrace living in the gray area. If you ever felt like you were always
Starting point is 00:26:51 too much this while also never being enough that, this is the podcast for you. Every Tuesday I'll be bringing you conversations around personal growth, issues affecting the Latin community, and much more via my own personal stories along with interviews with inspiring thought leaders from our Community then every Thursday I'll be tackling trending stories and current events from our community that you need to know so much of what makes our Community so beautiful is our diversity yet too often those of us who don't fit into this dumb stereotypical box of whatever it means to be Latino are left without a voice or just forgotten about.
Starting point is 00:27:27 On this show, I celebrate the uniqueness of our culture and invite you to walk in your authenticity. Listen to Life as a Gringo as a part of the MyKultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I used to have so many men. How this beguiling woman in her 50s. She looked like a million bucks. podcasts. driveway. Is it like a mansion? Yes, it's a mansion that this queen of the con uses to scam some of the biggest names in professional sports out of untold fortunes. About six million. Approximately 11 million dollars. Nearly 10 million dollars was all gone. Employing whatever
Starting point is 00:28:20 means necessary to bleed her victims dry. She would probably have sex with one of her clients. Hide your money in your old rich men because she is on the prowl. Listen to Queen of the Con season five, The Athlete Whisperer on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. All right. Yeah. Those were good ads. Good ads. Jamie!
Starting point is 00:28:47 Good products. After all those good ads, are you ready to hear more about the systematic torture of cats by generations of Europeans? I just got a cat, Robert. This is not fair. I love cats. Oh my god, shout out Flea! Shout out to Flea, my cat.
Starting point is 00:29:02 He's got a big neck. When I say about my cat, he's got a big neck. Freaks mea. Shout out to Flea, my cat. He's got a big neck. When I say about my cat, he's got a big neck. He frees me out. Shout out to Roach, one of the side characters in the first version of the movie with Keanu Reeves, where some of the people are bank robbers, but they're also surfers.
Starting point is 00:29:23 Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, you're talking about the Keanu Reeves surfing movie with, um, with what's his name? We've covered it on the Bechdel cast. What is it called? Yes. Roach is the one who bleeds out in a plane. Point Break? He's a good character.
Starting point is 00:29:36 We're talking about Point Break? Yes, Point Break. That's the movie. A classic. Yes. Now, uh, in France, there was a centuries old tradition of burning hundreds of cats to death in gigantic bonfires. Louis XVI even famously lit Paris's cat fire in 1648. Brulère Leschatz.
Starting point is 00:29:54 The king set the cat fire? Yeah, of course, who else, Jamie? Who else? This is just all news to me. Just, I just need a second. Yes, it was news to me too. Okay, I'm glad that this wasn't like common knowledge. I would be horrified if I just didn't know
Starting point is 00:30:10 even burning cats, okay. It doesn't surprise, obviously like you have to assume earlier times people are more callous to cats and dogs because them being like what they are now is kind of a more recent development because we have all these extra resources. But I didn't realize it was this like cruel. This is a lot.
Starting point is 00:30:32 Yeah. The king is sending the catfire. That's like bad writing. Yeah. So the king would, yeah. So brûlé les chats, which I am not going to pronounce more correctly than that because it's a horrible thing and fuck fuck france As it was called
Starting point is 00:30:47 Varied in a number of different ways. Sometimes it was just massive bonfires where living cats were tied Together in like huge pyres sometimes living cats were tied above small fires on like a spit and then roasted to death Sometimes cats were set in wooden cages and burnt to death to death. Sometimes cats were set in wooden cages and burnt to death. In some towns, people known as cormods, cat chasers, would soak cats in fuel, light them on fire, and chase them through town to the amusement of citizens. People wonder why cats are so upset all the time. I know, right? They have, they're an oppressed species.
Starting point is 00:31:20 Yes they are. Yeah, I would be pissed. You should be. I'm pissed. I am. The charred remains of these tortured cats were taken home as good luck charms by people. In 1730, as revolutionary sentiment simmered and bubbled throughout French society, two Parisian apprentice printers got fed up with their masters and abducted their cats.
Starting point is 00:31:39 They staged a massive public trial, the Great Cat Massacre, as it's become known to history. Now, this was tied more towards issues of class hatred than hatred of cats, but the cats wound up actually like, taking the brunt of the damage. But they end up being the scape cats for the whole situation. Exactly, exactly. And that's also the worst way to die as a symbol for something that has nothing to do with you.
Starting point is 00:32:02 Yeah, those cats have no understanding of class theory. It's like if someone like murdered me and then they're like, well, this has something to do with like my opinion on the new Taylor Swift record. It has nothing to do with Jamie, but I killed her to send a message. It would be like if one group of aliens came to earth and murdered you for something they knew human beings
Starting point is 00:32:24 were going to do 100 years in the future. Something you're completely incapable of understanding or knowing about. Like just, yeah, it's just wild. But these apprentices felt their masters treated the family cats better than their workers. And because they couldn't quite murder their bosses, they got a crowd together and they captured
Starting point is 00:32:44 a bunch of rich people's cats. And then they put them on trial and sent them to be hung until dead and they hung just a fuckload of cats to death. They made like the owners of the cats watch it was super fucked up. I don't know what to do right now. Well I'm having a panic attack. Well, I think what you can do right now is you can get a little bit into the head of a sensitive young soul like Maximiliani Portas, because a lot of this stuff was still going on in France. It wasn't at its worst, but like cat torture and burning was still happening in the countryside. And she sees this as a little girl and is like, this is part of why she hates those
Starting point is 00:33:21 like, you know, French revolutionary values of freedom and equality is she's like, well, clearly this is all bullshit. Look at what they're doing to these animals. Like where's their, you know, equality and freedom and like, like, like she, that's kind of like where she comes at this from, right? Yeah. Um, yeah. So she's deeply sympathetic to animals and particularly cats and basically incapable of being sympathetic to human beings.
Starting point is 00:33:44 Um, and yeah, it's an interesting story. cats and basically incapable of being sympathetic to human beings. And yeah, it's an interesting story. I'm going to be interested in how she galaxy brains being sympathetic towards the plight of, of, of brutally murdered cats to becoming a fascist. But you know, I think it's a pretty common thing for fascists to be honest. It's common for all of us to fascism. Well, you know, not committing cat murders, but like, hating people because of how garbage they are and thinking fascism is the only way to fix things because people just can't be allowed to live on their own.
Starting point is 00:34:21 OK, I knew that. I thought you were saying cat specific reasons. I'm like, well, this is a true education. Yeah. Now, Maxime Yanni was very good in school. She was a bright student. She read and wrote constantly. And her very favorite writer was a 19th century French poet named Charles Leconte de Lyle.
Starting point is 00:34:39 And here's how Cevitri's biographer describes Leconte de Lyle's work in the book, Hitler's Priestess, which is really the only decent biography of Savitri Devi. Interesting. Quote, Leconte de Lisle's own tragic view of the universe, his romantic colors were always tinged with somber pessimism, strongly appealed to Maximiani. He regarded all religious symbols as fragments of the divine truth, but the profusion of faiths over time convinced him of the relative value and ultimate vanity of every doctrine.
Starting point is 00:35:04 Beset by a sense of cosmic futility, Leconte de Lisle rejected Christianity and evoked the stoical heroism of barbarian and exotic peoples in his famous poem, Psycho Poems Barberes. He was also powerfully attracted to Hinduism. Following the translation of its sacred texts in the 1840s, Maximiliani felt a profound sympathy with Leconte de Lisle's view of life's fragility, the vanity of existence, and the illusion of the world. His romantic poems about the ancient Egyptians, the Scandinavians, the Celts, and Hindus, their proud paganism and heroic action, yet final resignation in the face of death and oblivion confirmed her own aversion to Christianity and helped her form her own fatalistic worldview.
Starting point is 00:35:42 So Goths didn't exist in the early 20th century, but Maxime Ani is clearly that. Yeah. She is a proto-Goth. It's again, it's just like if there had been a hot topic for her to, you know, be an assistant manager at, a lot could have been avoided. Imagine how many hot topic employees were saved by that business. Yeah, a lot of them. Imagine how many fascists we avoided by, for example, the existence of Kylo Ren fan fiction. Honestly, honestly, wow, that actually hit for me. Wow, that hit that-
Starting point is 00:36:20 People need an outlet, you know? And if you don't, this is what happens. Right. You're just like, if you can make it horny and palatable you're going to prevent something bad for this was a a young girl who Desperately needed to be distracted and nothing distracted her and that right is a problem Lays out a pretty clear track for you to really I mean I just yeah Send me back in time with a Jack Skellington hoodie for this woman. Oh my God, that would have solved so many problems. I want to do it. Created some others. I mean, she still would have been a deeply annoying person,
Starting point is 00:36:53 but like, I had a Jack Skellington hoodie, but also I had never seen the movie. I was a total poser. Oh boy, that's going to get you canceled harder than anything else today. And then I saw the movie and guess what? I didn't like it very much. I watched it. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. Well, actually I don't, I think it's maybe not so good. Beautiful animation though. Anyways. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got to judge it for its time.
Starting point is 00:37:21 Do I? Anyways. It was no, for example, the little toaster. I don't know. I do. I do I? Anyways. No. It was no, for example, The Little Toaster. I don't know. I do prefer the trick. No, Brave Little Toaster, ugh. Brave Little Toaster Hive come out. It didn't fuck kids up. No, no it didn't fuck kids up.
Starting point is 00:37:36 I loved The Brave Little Toaster. Brave Little Toaster damaged me forever. Really? That's why he throws bagels. Oh my God. But he was so brave, Robert. He was so brave. That movie fucked me up. That's why you throw bagels, a brave rubber. He was so brave movie fucked me That's why you throw bagels right Robert. I don't know. It's why I'm scared of fucking radiators
Starting point is 00:37:53 We're gonna do some exposure therapy for you With now brave little toaster. That's why he doesn't toast his bagels He only throws them. That's embarrassing. I mean, that's like tragic. Imagine the path we could have avoided. I know. Maximilliani Portis was very political as a young girl. When World War I started in 1914, she, at nine years old, knew very clearly that she
Starting point is 00:38:21 did not trust the Entente powers. So like England, France, you know, Russia. Some of this likely came from the fact that Greece's King Constantine was very pro-German and refused to get into the war on the side of either the Entente or the central powers. But the King of Greece's Prime Minister, a guy named Venizelos, which I'm probably mispronouncing, disagreed with the king. He was very pro-British and supported Greece getting into the war. The two fought over this for years until in 1916 a group of pro-Venezuelan army officers staged a coup against the king. There were rumors that the Entente had backed this,
Starting point is 00:38:57 and those rumors seemed credible in light of the fact that French and British troops landed in Salonika and Athens in 1915 and 16 to force Greek compliance in their demands for military access to the Macedonian front so they could better fight Austria-Hungary. That's a lot of history there, but basically she's very pro-Greece and wants Greece to stay out of the war because she also likes Germany, hates the English, hates the French. And she's pissed off because England and France back this prime minister who wants Greece to get into the war and they also fuck with Greek sovereignty and stuff.
Starting point is 00:39:29 So she gets really angry over all this. And how old is she at this point? Like where are we? Nine, 10, 11 years old. Wow. By 1916 when the war happens. Imagine, did you know what was going on in the world when you were nine or 10 years old?
Starting point is 00:39:43 Like how aware were you? I was pretty aware. I mean, 9-11 happened when I was like 12 and that was definitely like the start of me getting political. I guess, yeah, I was eight, so that makes sense. And World War I, yeah. You know, World War I's that level of thing, right? Where like even a little kid is gonna like, you're gonna pay attention to that shit.
Starting point is 00:40:00 It's kind of a big deal. You won't have a fully formed opinion, but you'll know what's going on. You'll know what's going on. I guess I'm just like, it's kind of a big deal. You won't have a fully formed opinion, but you'll know what's going on. You'll know what's going on. I guess I'm just like, it would be so bizarre to me if someone was like, Jamie's beliefs at eight years old was 9-11 was, school got out early that day. And this is where I should note that this is going to be an imperfect episode in terms of that sort of thing, because our main source on this is Hitler's Priestess, which is a biography that's fairly decent,
Starting point is 00:40:26 but also flawed because it's mainly based on Savitri Devi's own biographical writings of her recollections of her own life. Like there's just not a lot of information. There's not a lot, it weren't a lot of people to go back to and like talk to about her and as a child and stuff, who were still alive when she became relevant.
Starting point is 00:40:43 Like the book was written in 98. Yeah. If I could write about like what I thought, I thought at eight years old, I'd be like, Jamie was a brilliant genius who had strong opinions on foreign policy. Exactly. Okay, got it. Well, but that said, given the, I don't think we shouldn't discard all of this because if you look at the thrust of her life, she does live the life of someone who's always been very political.
Starting point is 00:41:07 I mean, she's tuned into Latin class. I don't think that's entirely made up. Sure. Yeah, exactly. That's a vibe. So, yeah, Venizelos and his men took over part of Greece with the backing of Britain and France, and those two countries were happy to recognize his government while they carried out a brutal 10-month blockade of the Greek provinces that stayed loyal to the king.
Starting point is 00:41:26 And young Maximianii watched all this as she grew into an adolescent girl. Some of her earliest memories were news reports of protests from Athens of royalist crowds railing against the Entente, and Maximianii sided with them and considered the Entente's treatment of Greece to be basically criminal. Her disgust was reinforced after the war. In the wake of the central powers defeat, the Ottoman Empire was broken up, and Greece was given control in the Versailles Treaty of a city called Smyrna. Now, Smyrna is a city on the Aegean coast of Anatolia,
Starting point is 00:41:54 which is modern day Turkey. It was the center of a nearly 3000 year old Greek community that lived on the coast of Anatolia. Greece, with some justification, thought that a lot of Anatolia ought to be part of Greece because it was culturally and historically Greece, and the newly created nation of Turkey did not agree. So with the backing of the Versailles Treaty, Greece invaded Smyrna in 1919 to make good on the promises that, you know, had been made to them by the Entente, and the fighting was a disaster from the beginning. The Ottoman Empire had been defeated in the war technically, but on the ground and actual battles, their soldiers had performed pretty well.
Starting point is 00:42:29 They'd fought off a big invasion at Gallipoli. The birth of the Turkish nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire was met with the swelling of nationalist fervor and Anatolia, and this helped to spawn a powerful insurgent Turkish movement dedicated to defeating the Greek invasion. So a truce was
Starting point is 00:42:46 reached in 1920, but like many recent truces in Turkish military history, it was not a real truce. And around the same time, King Constantine was restored to the Greek throne. This turned the remaining great powers of Europe against Greece, and even though they'd promised Greece Smyrna and the Versailles Treaty, in 1921 they basically like, were like, fuck that shit and pulled all of their support. Do we know where the Greeks at this time stood on cats? You know, they're closer to the Middle East, so I'm gonna guess more pro-cat.
Starting point is 00:43:17 More pro-cat, okay. Okay, so now it's, so, okay. That tracks. Yeah, I think that tracks. Yeah, the further in that direction you get, more pro-cat, less pro-dog. You know, I think that tracks. Yeah, the further in that direction you get, more pro-cat, less pro-dog. I think that's generally fair. So it just says Western freaks. Yeah, they've got a lot of dogs.
Starting point is 00:43:32 Yeah, I mean, everyone should be pro-cat and dog. Maybe they just lit cats and dogs on fire. I don't know. I did not do that research. Okay, these are the questions I have, Robert. Take them or leave them. So the French and Italian governments like betray Greece first and they sign agreements with the Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal and to ignore the promises they'd made in the Versailles
Starting point is 00:43:55 Treaty to Greece. Britain held out the longest but when Greece launched an offensive in Anatolia in March of 1921, all of the Allies suddenly adopted a policy of neutrality. Britain banned further arms sales to Greece, while France was happy to allow its weapons makers to sell straight to Turkey. The whole effort to incorporate the Greek regions of Anatolia into the Greek nation ended in disaster and military defeat in 1922. Greek forces fled Asia Minor and the Turkish army conducted a campaign of extermination and ethnic cleansing on their Aegean coast. They massacred some 30,000 Christians, a mix
Starting point is 00:44:29 of Greeks, Armenians, and Franks, in order to ensure no Greek independence movement would ever crop up on their coast again. Awesome. The Smyrna debacle, yeah, this is why there's no real Greek community in Anatolia anymore, not like there was for 3,000 years prior. This is like what wipes out that community. Okay. Yeah. So you can see why a Greek nationalist,
Starting point is 00:44:50 like Maximiany Portas, who is like 15, 16 years old then and like really actually starting to like understand the world is furious about all this. And it breeds in her a powerful hatred of the Entente powers, particularly of France and of England. And she basically felt that like all these fancy words they had about liberty and democracy were bullshit when they couldn't even hold the basic promises and protect the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Greek civilians. Of course. That's a fair point. Very valid. Yes.
Starting point is 00:45:22 Yeah, yeah. Now, I'm not trying to like ignore the Turkish point of view in this too. Like Greece is not in the right here as a country either. Like everybody's in the wrong, although Turkey massacres 30,000 people. So I'm going to say maybe they're more in the wrong, but this is complicated. But this is sort of how Maximiliani is very much on the side of Greece is fucked over and this is an entirely like a crime committed by the, the Entente powers against, against Greece. And it sets up the rest of her life in a lot of ways. Okay.
Starting point is 00:45:52 Um, so, uh, other influences on her developing mind were the site of French crowds in Leon, cheering uproariously at the brutal terms of the treaty of Versailles when they were announced. She was horrified, uh, when the French government stationed black Senegalese troops to occupy the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland. Now this is one of those moves by France that engendered a whole shitload of racism in central Europe. It was a big influence on a lot of early Nazi thinkers too. And obviously black soldiers aren't any worse than white ones,
Starting point is 00:46:20 but as civilians living under military occupation, you're going to hate whatever foreign soldiers occupy your country. And if those soldiers are the only black people you've ever met, it wasn't a great move on France's behalf. Jesus Christ. Yeah. So I'm trying to set up all of like, this is like the shit that like is forming. She's 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 is all this is going on. Like formative fucking years. Yeah. Yeah, so she hates it France She hates England. She hates black people. She hates Turkish people. She's
Starting point is 00:46:52 She loves a lot more hate. She loves cats. This is the consistent one. Yeah Yeah in 1923 a freshly graduated Max Miani portis left France to attend college in Greece. She was just on the edge of 18 and furious with the status quo in Europe without any real clear idea of how she thought things ought to be instead.
Starting point is 00:47:14 She did however know that she was obsessed with Hellenism, which is like ancient Greek culture. Well, of course, she's a dork, yeah. She's a big fucking dork. She's a dork. She's like, wait, Helen of. Yeah, she's a big fucking door. She loves her She's like wait Helen of Troy. Absolutely. Oh my god Uh-huh would not shut up about the Iliad. She was a fucking you know, I've read multiple translations and you're like, can you not? Okay, she has strong and profoundly thirsty opinions on it
Starting point is 00:47:42 She's like ranked gods and goddesses hot to nut. If she'd seen the actual movie Troy that came out like a decade ago, she would have been furious because there's no way Brad Pitt was as hot as the Achilles in her mind. Beautiful. Yeah. She believed the old Greeks had been, quote, a civilization of iron rooted in truth, a civilization with all the virtues of the ancient world None of its weaknesses and all the technical achievements of the modern age without modern hypocrisy
Starting point is 00:48:11 Pettiness and moral squalor now. This is of course wildly inaccurate the ancient Greeks were like Unbelievably fucked up. They also did a lot of bullshit obviously like every other ancient Yeah, that's all ancient people do a lot of cool shit. Aztecs, amazing shit, horribly fucked up. Ancient Romans, amazing shit. Han Chinese, amazing shit, horribly fucked, everybody, yeah. In the Greek specific case, they fucked a bunch of little kids.
Starting point is 00:48:38 They repeatedly put narcissistic idiots in charge of their city-states. They made numerous blunders that ensured their period of military and economic might was short-lived, and they also created some of the most influential philosophy and fiction and art that has ever been made in the history of the human race. Complicated people. Maximilliani does not get a complex picture of ancient Greece.
Starting point is 00:48:58 It's just the good shit. Yeah. Yeah. Good lord. So, you might say, like, I don't know, like I want to say here, understanding of Greek history was not deep. It was certainly incomplete. Um, that said pretty much only like the only thing Europeans would write about
Starting point is 00:49:15 the ancient Greeks in that period was wildly positive. You weren't going to get like critical. Like commentary on, for example, pedederasty in ancient Greece in fucking 1920. Like you're just not gonna read that. Yeah. So her love of Greece was mostly focused on obsessing over their incredible art and fantasizing about the idealized culture
Starting point is 00:49:37 that she believed had existed there. Right. I mean, we as children all read revisionist history about horrifying cultures. I was obsessed with ancient Rome as a kid read revisionist history about horrifying cultures. I was obsessed with ancient Rome as a kid for a lot of the same reasons. Of course, because you're just like, oh, it seems like they only did dope stuff
Starting point is 00:49:52 and wore cool outfits. Well, I will say I was kind of a fucked up kid. So when I learned about like all of the fucking crucifixions and shit, I was kind of like, hell yeah. Wow, Robert, you're so metal. I mean, it is pretty fucking metal. You're so fucking metal. We'll talk about what they did to Spartacus
Starting point is 00:50:09 and his friends one of these days, but it's fucking one of like the biggest mic drop moments in the history of torturing people to death with wood. I think that's fair to say. Thrilled to have such a hyper specific. So she moves to Greece. She's super happy for a while. Obviously best place in the world for this girl is fucking Greece at this point in
Starting point is 00:50:33 time. Um, and the time she spent discovering the wonders of Athens, which rules, um, coincided with some very important goings on in Germany. And I'm going to quote again from the book Hitler's Priestess. Quote, years later, she would recall that she spent such a sunlit afternoon upon the Acropolis on 9th October, 1923, the fateful day of Hitler's putsch when he and his followers had attempted a coup against the Bavarian government and staged a march to the Feldherren Hall in the center of Munich.
Starting point is 00:51:01 The police successfully broke up the march and 16 martyrs of the early Nazi movement fell beneath the hail of bullets. When details of the incident were published in the world press the following day, there was some discussion over lunch at the International Home Hostel, which is where she was crashing at the time. Maximiani admits that she did not yet connect Hitler with her own dream of a new racial order based on her view of classical Greek antiquity.
Starting point is 00:51:21 However, she strongly sympathized with him as an enemy of the allies on account of his contempt for the Versailles treaty and saw a parallel between his nationalist idea of one state for all Germans and the Magali idea among the Greeks, which is the idea that like Greece should recoup its ancient like power and like take over the places that it controlled back in the day. Seems a little idealistic. She engaged in the heated argument in defense of Hitler with the French manageress of the hostel.
Starting point is 00:51:48 Oh, God. So we've lost her. Arguing about Hitler with the hostel. No, we lost her with the cat thing, I think. I mean, she's been gone for a while. Yeah. Good Lord. But you know who won't argue in support of Hitler with the French hostel owner in Athens?
Starting point is 00:52:01 Who, Robert? The products and services that support this podcast. Products and services would never ever hurt us or do something wrong. I've been saying it for years. I have agreed for years. Let's fingers crossed for a dick pill ad right after this. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:52:17 What a great transition both of you. Just wonderful work. Thank you. So talented. Thank you. Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odysseus, Cassandra, Medusa? But how much do you know about them from the ancient world? Let's talk about Myths, Baby is the podcast bringing the ancient sources to life.
Starting point is 00:52:39 Greek myth and history is timeless and unless you've been living under a rock, you have seen just how true that is today. But there is so much more to these characters and stories than what pop culture can do justice. I'm Liv Albert, the host of Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and every week I bring you stories from the ancient world, both mythological and historical, to breathe new life into these thousands of years old stories. I'm also regularly joined by some of the most brilliant names in the field of archaeology oracle to breathe new life into these thousands of years old stories. I'm also regularly joined by some of the most brilliant names in the field of archaeology
Starting point is 00:53:09 and ancient history, authors of your favorite retellings from today, and everyone in between. Join me as I dive into the wild world of the ancient Greeks and their stories. Listen to Let's Talk About Myths, Baby, on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Danielle Moody here, host of the Woke F Daily podcast. We've been with iHeart's outspoken network for a year and what a year it has been. Every weekday, I navigate our rapidly changing world alongside our series of fabulous expert guests. As we head deeper into 2024 and yet another life-changing election cycle, Woke AF Daily is here to keep you sane and woke.
Starting point is 00:53:53 Woke not just to the latest headlines, but also to the collective power we all have. Woke to the need to build community with those around us. Woke to how to avoid burnout and woke to the ways we can all find joy in the madness. Make Woke F Daily with Danielle Moody your podcast destination for 2024 election news and analysis. And tune in to hear the ways I am working to stay grounded amidst it all. Listen to Woke F Daily Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I used to have so many men. How this beguiling woman in her fifties.
Starting point is 00:54:34 She looked like a million bucks. With zero qualifications. She had a Harvard plaque. Tricks her way past a wall of lawyers and agents. She's got all of these Maseratis and Bentleys all in the driveway. Is it like a mansion? Yes, it's a mansion. That this queen of the con uses to scam some of the biggest names in professional sports out of untold fortunes.
Starting point is 00:54:59 About six million. Approximately 11 million dollars. Nearly 10 million dollars was all gone. Employing whatever means necessary to bleed her victims dry. She would probably have sex with one of her clients. Hide your money in your old rich men because she is on the prowl. Listen to Queen of the Con, Season 5, The Athlete Whisperer on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back!
Starting point is 00:55:32 So it was during this first visit to Greece that Maximianni Portis would have seen the symbol for the first time that would come to define her life and legacy. I am talking, of course, about the swastika. Odds are good she would have encountered it for the first time in the National Museum of Athens, which hosted a huge amount of what were believed to be Trojan artifacts, which had been uncovered by the pioneering and controversial archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Now Schliemann was not a professional archaeologist, which is not weird for the time. Most of like the archaeologists of this period are like gentlemen adventurers who get our nerds basically. The people in like the mummy movies
Starting point is 00:56:10 who are just wearing khakis and have money. Exactly. The people in Tarzan. That was the most accurate thing about the mummy movie other than the way mummies react to shotguns. They're all named Clayton. Yeah. Yeah. So Schliemann, yeah, throughout the mid-1800s had been a very successful German arms merchant, trading raw materials for the ingredients to make ammunition. And he'd nursed a deep obsession with the Iliad his entire life. In his late middle age, he decided to take his fortune to the Aegean and try to uncover the true location of the ancient city of Troy. Unlike pretty much any traditional archaeologist, Schliemann used the Iliad as a guide. He thought
Starting point is 00:56:50 this book was basically, essentially accurate. And he followed the poem as if it had been a work of serious historical scholarship. And shockingly enough, this kind of worked. In 1871, after three years of searching, Schlleeman found what was very likely to have been the site of ancient Troy. His methods of digging it up were brutal. He used crowbars and battering rams and destroyed countless thousands of artifacts, including, ironically, what a lot of archaeologists now believe was the actual physical evidence of Troy. He dug too far down, basically, because he fucked up and probably destroyed what actual Trojan relics there were but he doesn't mind what a lot of people think was the sight of Troy it's just other shit was built there and he dug up the wrong shit anyway it's fucked up yes yes so his research or his digging despite all the
Starting point is 00:57:39 shit destroyed produced hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of artifacts which people at the time believed to be Trojan. And many of those artifacts, more than 1800 of them, were emblazoned with various types of swastika. And I'm going to quote next from Scientific American. He would go on to see the swastika everywhere, from Tibet to Paraguay to the Gold Coast of Africa. And as Schliemann's exploits grew more famous and archaeological discoveries became a way of creating a narrative of national identity, the swastika grew more prominent.
Starting point is 00:58:10 It exploded in popularity as a symbol of good fortune, appearing on Coca-Cola products, Boy Scouts and Girls Club materials, and even American military uniforms. "'The antiquities unearthed by Dr. Schliemann at Troy acquire for us a double interest,' wrote British linguist Archibald Sace in 1896. They carry us back to the later stone ages of the Aryan race. Oh dear. On Coca-Cola products?
Starting point is 00:58:36 Robert, what if that was just a product or service advertised? But it wasn't a Nazi. I spent some time living in India. I understand, yeah. And it's fucking, there's swastikas all over the day. And it is weird, it takes, you never really get used to it because of like what it means to the West.
Starting point is 00:58:51 It's always like, there's so many swastikas around here. That is, I mean, and that is fascinating to like track the history of a symbol and like how it affects different areas of the world differently. That sounds extremely jarring. I actually, I have some like tapestries that I picked up in India that have little swastikas on them in parts.
Starting point is 00:59:10 And it's one of those things where it's like every now and then, like they're not the same as the Nazi swastikas, but they're close enough that people will be like, what's up? Oh no, hi Robert. I need to leave your home right now. Yeah, I mean, yeah. You're like, oh no, the swastikas are pretty small.
Starting point is 00:59:26 It's Indian. So most people aren't getting close enough to the blanket. They're not Nazi swastikas. Oh my. They're not Nazi swastikas. See, Robert, if I was over your house and you said that, I would be like, I actually, my Uber is here.
Starting point is 00:59:38 You know, like if you're like, they're not Nazi swastikas, so calm down. Yeah, it's like that a- And they offer me a Miller light. They're not Nazi swastikas, would you like a Miller light? No! That's exactly my standard greeting to people. That's how you greet all your guests.
Starting point is 01:00:00 That's specifically how I say hello to the officers who pull me over for speeding. No, no. I would be interested in, I know I've gone down that Wikipedia hole at one point of just like tracking the symbology of the swastikas. It goes back so far. There's criticism to Schliemann honestly for his methods, but he's not in any way a Nazi. Like he's just a guy who finds a bunch of swastikas buried underground and finds them all over the world. He's just an unqualified archaeologist using his money in a weird way. He's very controversial still.
Starting point is 01:00:32 There are aspects of what he did that a lot of people praise, because he got a lot of shit right, but he also destroyed a huge amount of cultural antiquities. He's an interesting person. You should read about Schliemann if you're interested in archaeology. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. God damn.
Starting point is 01:00:47 I mean, it seems like a lot of those gentlemen explorers really delighted and, you know, like destroying and selling off pieces of ancient history that had nothing to do with them. All of them are problematic. Yeah. Love that for them. I will say Schliemann is one who comes from like a purer place of just being really into this history.
Starting point is 01:01:10 But yeah, you know, they're all problematic. So. Hashtag problematic. Yeah. Now the swastikas he found increasingly all over the world played directly into a shared delusion that was spreading like a disease among many of the era's white people, the myth of the ancient Aryan. Now in actual
Starting point is 01:01:29 historical terms, Aryan is a term used to refer to the Indo-Aryan language group. It was never a racial classification. The term started being used because early linguists noticed strange similarities between languages like German, Romani, Punjabi, Hindu, Urdu, and Sanskrit. While the term Aryan was initially applied to speakers of various Indo-Iranian languages, the understanding of the word became corrupted in the late 1800s. This occurred along the same time that colonialism started to reach its absolute zenith, and there were a lot of white folks looking for reasons to
Starting point is 01:02:01 justify the fact that they were basically plundering and enslaving the entire world. There were also a lot of white folks looking at their increasingly multiracial societies, which at that point, like Italians and Slavs breed with Germans and British people. And we're getting concerned about this fact. And I'm going to refer back to Smithsonian magazine again. Quote, the rising interest in eugenics and racial hygiene, however, led some to corrupt Aryan into a descriptor for an ancient master racial identity with a clear through line
Starting point is 01:02:29 to contemporary Germany. As the Washington Post reported in a story about the rise of Nazism several years before the start of World War II, Aryanism was an intellectual dispute between bewiskered scholars as to the existence of a pure and undefiled Aryan race at one stage of Earth's history. In the 19th century, French aristocrat Arthur de Gaubigneaux and others made the connection between the mythical Aryans and the Germans, who were the superior descendants of the early people, now destined to lead the world to greater advancement by conquering their neighbors. The findings of Schliemann's dig in Turkey, then, suddenly had a deeper ideological meaning.
Starting point is 01:03:01 For the nationalists, the purely Aryan symbol Schliemann uncovered was no longer an archaeological mystery. It was a stand-in for their superiority. German nationalist groups like the Reichshammerbund, a 1912 anti-Semitic group, and the Bavarian Freikorps, paramilitary, basically the proud boys of the era, used the swastika to reflect their newly discovered identity as the master race. Now the reality is that swastikas appear damn near everywhere in human history. It's a common design and a striking one and a bunch of different groups of people have independently figured it out over time.
Starting point is 01:03:31 And people should stop talking to you about your blanket and actually just relax, they're pretty small. If you're, nowadays the swastika is the swastika. Like it's a Nazi thing, unless you're in India, because the world's big. But back in these days, like it's a Nazi thing, unless you're in India, because the world's big. But back in these days, like if you're looking at like ancient history, it's best to kind of look at the swastika, like you remember that weird S doodle
Starting point is 01:03:52 we all put on our trapper keepers back in the 90s? 100%, yes. Like no one invented that, it just showed up everywhere. That's the fucking swastika in prehistory. It's just all over the damn place. I would get that blanket. But of course, yeah, Oh, I have that blanket. It was not seen as this though, by a lot of people.
Starting point is 01:04:13 And anthropologist Gwendolyn Lake notes, quote, when Heinrich Schleman discovered swastika like decorations on pottery, flag, and all archeological levels at Troy, it was seen as evidence for a racial continuity and proof that the inhabitants of the site had been Aryan all along. The link between the Swastika and Indo-European origin once forged was impossible to discard. It allowed the projection of nationalist feelings and associations onto a universal symbol,
Starting point is 01:04:38 which hence served as a distinguishing boundary marker between non-Aryan, or rather non-German, and German identity. 06.30 That's fascinating. I mean, because you can understand the logic, but it also is kind of absurd to assume that like, oh, this symbol is always surely must mean the exact same thing thousands of years ago as it does to me today now. 06.40 The people then were as dumb as the people who planted the Iowa caucuses.
Starting point is 01:05:05 Wow. And that's why all this happened. Robert, my dog worked on the shadow app, so really watch your mouth. Your dog was the smartest person involved with that app. Sunny invested in the shadow app. I have to say it's bad dog. This math adds up. Yeah, I mean, of course he kept,
Starting point is 01:05:25 he was talking about Shadow App for, and I'm like, that can't be real. And then it turns out it was real. He probably thought it was the dog from, what was that movie with the dogs and cat, the talk and they find their family. I'm so bad at the names of things today. Oh, that sounds terrible.
Starting point is 01:05:38 I don't know what that movie. It's a good movie, Homeward Bound. Homeward, oh, I haven't seen Homeward Bound. Sonny definitely just wanted to harm people and he wanted to harm the discourse and that's why he invested in Shadow App. Word. That's fair. That's fair.
Starting point is 01:05:52 You could call him the Hitler of the Iowa Caucasus, which a lot of people do. No. I mean, many have, but it makes me uncomfortable. So. Sitting in Athens, reading the news of Hitler's movement in Germany, and staring at ancient swastikas on beloved Greek artifacts, things started to come together in Maximilliani
Starting point is 01:06:10 Portas' mind. She moved to Greece permanently in 1928, after finishing college and renouncing her French citizenship. The very next year, 1929, she went with her mother and aunt on a trip to the Holy Land that wound up having just as deep an impact on her developing mind as the swastika. Now, Maximiani had never been very religious. Her mother and aunt were, though, and while they failed to inculcate a love of Christ in Maximiani, they did succeed in making her hate Jewish people. Yay! Which is not the part of Christianity to transfer, if you're going to pick one. Of all, I mean, there's so many different horrible things to take away from Christianity
Starting point is 01:06:46 and that is, that is the worst of all that's bad. Yeah. Jesus. She got none of the good stuff, just the anti-Semitism. Okay. Yeah, she, yeah, it's not great. It's not great. I'm starting to think this lady maybe not so nice.
Starting point is 01:07:04 Not heading in a great direction. Yeah. Now, a lot of this was tied to the fact that Maximiani was so in love with Greek culture. And she was really pissed off because she was like, particularly in love with like ancient Greek pagan culture, like the old Greek gods and their myths and stuff. And none of that stuff was very relevant other than this, like an academic thing by this point in history. And Christianity and Judaism were obviously very relevant other than this like an academic thing by this point in history and Christianity and Judaism were obviously hugely relevant in Europe and she hated this and she blamed the Jews for the fact that nobody Other people weren't as into Greek history as she was like this is like the core of it for her She's in love with like Zeus and shit and she's like why don't people like this as much as I do it's the Jews
Starting point is 01:07:43 She's become a chaos nerd. No! Yeah, yeah. Oh, God. It's not great. Yeah, that's really bad. So her trip to the Holy Land with her mom and aunt was a bit of a weird one.
Starting point is 01:07:56 No! Okay, I mean, okay, I'm listening. Yeah. She was revolted by the obeisance they played to Judeo-Christian holy sites, and as she touristed her way through old Jerusalem, she felt, in her biographers' words, overwhelmed and repelled by the exotic nature of the Jews, their attire, their customs,
Starting point is 01:08:13 observances, and festivals, the strange dark men in broad brimmed hats and long black coats hastening to prayers at the wailing wall. Okay. It's interesting that Goodwin Clark, Portis's biographer, mentions this specifically, seeing these Jewish people and being horrified by the way they look in their coats and in hair locks and long black coats. It's possible that precise moment never happened, but it's worth noting that this moment bears a striking resemblance to a tale Adolf Hitler told regularly about the supposed moment that he specifically gained his hatred of Jewish people. And here's how he wrote about that moment in Mein Kampf. This is
Starting point is 01:08:52 takes place in Linz, no sorry in Austria. Maybe his boy wrote this part, we don't know. Vienna. Once as I was strolling through the inner city I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? Was my first thought. For to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz where he grew up. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form. Is this a German? So it's like a huge moment in like Hitler lore. It's possible that the reason that Portis writes her own thing, like her own story this way, is that she's harkening
Starting point is 01:09:31 to Mein Kampf, because again, she writes about this later. It's also possible they just were similar people and had a similar moment. Well, if she's the primary resource for herself, and seems to have like a fair grasp on storytelling. It makes sense that she would pull from these. It does make sense. She's like, oh, this is the end of Act One.
Starting point is 01:09:50 Where's my inciting? She needs, she wrote her own inciting incident if it didn't. Yeah. I'll take a leaf out of, you know, it's like, uh, you know, George Lucas, uh, stole from, from great Japanese cinema, uh cinema to make Star Wars. And in a very similar fashion, Savitri Devi stole from Adolf Hitler, the Kurosawa of Nazism.
Starting point is 01:10:12 True artist steal, Robert. It's what they've been saying for generations. Yeah, that is funny. I mean, I feel like that same logic of like, you have to have a story to go with your hatred. They have that same logic on like, Iron Chef, you know, like, they have to be like, there has to be a story that goes with this dish. And sometimes you're like, sometimes it just is. Sometimes it just is. Sometimes you just cook some fucking food, asshole. Sometimes you just make some food and
Starting point is 01:10:39 it's bad. And it's terrible. Yeah. So, uh, Maxime Oni would go on to claim that after this visit to the Holy land, uh, she decided that Hitler's campaign of hate against Jewish people was not just a matter of German concern. It was an international crusade. She came to believe that all of the formerly pagan nations of Europe had to throw off their Judeo-Christian heritage and like reconnect with their pagan roots. And this is the first time she realizes that she's a national socialist. And she, the way she described it, she realizes she's always been a national socialist. And so she falls fully in love with Hitler at this point. And she's not a German Nazi though. And initially the way she decides to like act on this new found Nazism is to basically try to revive Greek nationalism and pagan beliefs kind of with the structure of national socialism over them.
Starting point is 01:11:37 And so she returns to Athens and she sets to work trying to cobble together her own Greek version of Nazism, but focused around a religious component that involved a return to worshiping the ancient Greek pantheon. I mean, always with this woman. Yeah. Now, by this point, the ancient Greeks had become sort of the ubermensch in her own mind, and this conception was nursed by the bits of Hitler speeches that made their way over into the press and her part of the world. By 1930, she finally read Mein Kampf for the very first time, which introduced Maximiani to Hitler's theories about the Aryan race. His ideas about the superior race, consistently undermined by the evil Jews,
Starting point is 01:12:14 gelled remarkably well with Maximiani's own beliefs about the ancient Greeks and the Jews. She became increasingly obsessed with the Aryans and in part the idea of seeking out the remaining evidence of their existence. And at the time, it was generally understood that India had been conquered and ruled by the Aryans. Many among the weirder Nazi set saw Hinduism as an example of a pure Aryan pagan tradition, uncorrupted by Judaism. They found the Hindu caste system deeply intriguing as well for reasons that should be obvious, and enshrined
Starting point is 01:12:43 a small number of superior beings and power over a vast number of less valuable individuals. In 1932, Max Miani's father died, and she decided to take this as an opportunity to travel to India to seek out the truth of the ancient Aryans. It's like a Nazi version of Eat Pray Love. I was going to say, this is like, this is is in another world, this is a very cute movie and she just took every wrong cue from it. It is the same beats. It's, you remember that horrible Cameron Crowe movie,
Starting point is 01:13:11 Elizabeth Towne, where Orlando Bloom drives across the country with his dad's ashes and is like, I'm glad we had this talk. You're like, what the fuck are you doing? That sounds like 40 different movies, Jamie. It's, no, it's the same. It's the same. All my Elizabeth Townheads will know it's the same. Polly Deen's in that movie.
Starting point is 01:13:32 Cursed. Oh God. Cursed. Speaking of Nazis. Cursed. Now, so Savitri decides she's gonna go to fucking India. And she's not the only person with this idea of going to India to seek out the Aryans. In in 1935 Heinrich Himmler's SS founded the Ananerbe a Scientific think tank dedicated to finding evidence of the ancient Aryans and they actually sent multiple expeditions into India and Tibet
Starting point is 01:13:56 Maximiliani went to India to find evidence of the Aryans too But she also went there to see firsthand evidence of a civilization founded upon what she believed was a natural racial hierarchy. She felt that Indian society looked how the world would appear in the year 8,000 after 6,000 years of Nazi rule. Very specific woman. 8,000! The Jonas Brothers didn't even think that far. No, but they're huge. The Nazi Jonas Brothers are huge in the year 8,000. Robert, shut up, enjoy this moment. That was, that was, that was, that one was for so fun.
Starting point is 01:14:27 I do not get that joke. The Jonas Brothers' first single in 2006 or maybe seven was a song called Year 3000. They said, not much has changed, but we live underwater. That's all they knew about. That's a lot to change, Jamie. Well, they'd say right before we live underwater that not much has changed.
Starting point is 01:14:47 They couch it. It's a year 3000, not much has changed. I've been two, three, 3000. No, I can't do anything else. I don't know the world. We live underwater. It's a weird lyric. It makes no sense.
Starting point is 01:15:00 Okay, sorry, Robert, continue your podcast. But she's thinking to your 8,000. 8,000. I refuse to think further than Kevin Jonas already has. You have to give her credit. She is eight times as ambitious as Hitler. Dear God. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:15:18 So upon her arrival in the country, her beliefs were seemingly confirmed when she watched a parade celebrating Rama, a deified Aryan hero. The parade featured huge numbers of dark-skinned Indians bowing and worshipping a lighter-skinned statue of Rama. And Rama is most assuredly not white, although he is often depicted as lighter-skinned, but he is definitely Indian. But it was not uncommon for Europeans who were attracted to India in this period to decide that a number of ancient Hindu heroes and gods were in fact white. This was like a common thing. And in fact, Maxime Ianni's favorite poet, who we talked about earlier, Lacanthe de Lisle, had actually written a poem about Rama that referred to him as, Thou whose blood is pure,
Starting point is 01:16:00 Thou whose body is white, and a subdurer of all the profane races." So, yeah, everyone's a little bit of a Nazi in colonialism. That's kind of the deal. That's kind of their thing. It's kind of, I mean, yeah, not shocking. And if you're interested in the story of Rama, one thing I would recommend that's super accessible, there's a movie online by Nina Paley, who's a female graphic artist who's amazing called Sita Sings the Blues. If you just Google that, it's the whole movie is free. It's one of those beautiful pieces of animation. It's why I went to India in the first place. It's an incredible movie. Oh, wow.
Starting point is 01:16:36 And one of the things it does really well is it has all these scenes where like individual like myths from like Hindu mythology are explained by like groups of people arguing about them, which if you actually go to India is how you learn about myths. Like if you talk about the myth of Sita and Rama to like a family, everyone in the family, you like it like multiple different versions of the story and people will argue with each other. Like it's not like Christian orthodoxy or whatever. Like it's very, very complicated stuff, but fascinating. So yeah, Maxime Yanni is convinced that this guy's white though.
Starting point is 01:17:12 And she falls in love with India and eventually finds her way to an ashram in Bengal where she's able to live cheap and learn Hindi and study Hindu religious traditions. She gets a job outside of Delhi teaching English and Indian history. And she grew more and more taken with Hinduism until in 1936, she adopted a Hindu name, Savitri Devi, taken from a Hindu solar goddess.
Starting point is 01:17:35 This woman is obsessed with sun gods and goddesses. She loves gods and goddesses so much. She's such a dork. Yeah, it's specifically sun gods and goddesses. She's fucking obsessed with Akhenaten too, it's weird. There was a girl in my middle school who was like, call me Artemis, and we were like, okay. No, no.
Starting point is 01:17:53 No, we did, we did! And I was also a dork, but not that kind of dork, my God. No, no, no, no. I was just a normal, bright-eyes loving dork. I'm a big believer in calling people by whatever name they prefer to be referred to, unless it's the name of a god or goddess. Then I just start, I just get furious.
Starting point is 01:18:15 Yeah. I'm not gonna push that behavior. Well, she was Artemis for all of eighth grade, and then she went back to just Alex for the rest of, as far as I know her life. That's fine. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:18:28 Yeah. Any other name really. Now, early on in her time in India, Savitri had hiked to the top of a hill and seen a beautiful Indian fortress, one of many such colossal ancient relics that dot the country. She was taken by its beauty and equally horrified by a more modern Jesuit hospital that had been constructed nearby. This was powerfully symbolic to her and she claimed that it cemented in her a deep need to protect Hindu India from being infected by Judeo-Christian taint. Starting in 1937, she began working as an anti-Christian preacher for Swami Satyananda's Hindu mission in Calcutta.
Starting point is 01:19:01 For two years, she crisscrossed the country, meeting with various tribal elders and arranging public debates with Christian missionaries. And I'd like to quote now from an article by Conrad Elst, an Indiologist who's analyzed this history. Quote, thoroughly familiar with the mentality and methods of her adversary, she could destroy the credit of the imported religion in the minds of the villagers, and prevent or undo many conversions. There was a sharp contradiction between her own racist and anti-egalitarian convictions and the reformist and egalitarian program of the Hindu mission. To the Hindu mission, Hinduism was a value in itself. To Savitri Devi, it was but an instrument of her imagined Aryan race. In her years as a preacher, she kept her non-Hindu preoccupations to herself, but in her memoirs She declared that she conceived of her reconversion mission as an exercise in deception from the racist Aryan viewpoint
Starting point is 01:19:49 It was necessary to give the most backward and degenerate aborigines a false Hindu consciousness. She wrote This is one of the major areas where you'll run into disputes about Savitri Devi the common view on her legacy is spoiler that she proposed a synthesis between Hinduism and Nazism, and aspects of this are true, but it would be more accurate to say that she found Hinduism a useful tool for advancing Nazism. And I'm going to quote again from Else's essay. In contrast with the Hindu nationalists, but in tune with Indian Marxists and casteists, she believed that the concept nation and a program of nationalism could not apply to
Starting point is 01:20:24 India. In 1938, she used the slogan, make every Hindu an Indian nationalist and every Indian nationalist a Hindu. Now this seems to be something she did not legitimately believe. Yeah. And she didn't really believe it. In her autobiography years later, she expressed the belief that nationalism could only exist within members of the same race. And she thought that all the different castes in India were different races. And we're getting into the weeds here too much. But it's important to understand for what comes next that Savitri Devi advocated for Hindu nationalism,
Starting point is 01:20:53 but not because she believed strongly in it, because she saw it as a useful tool for harming the British Empire and advancing Nazism. That was her main goal. So she's merely co-opting it for her own sinister purposes. It's a little more complicated than that because she also loves it. Like she takes on a lot of Hindu beliefs.
Starting point is 01:21:12 This is a weird story and there's no like super simple answer to it. But it's not as simple as she just becomes Hindu and also Nazi. Like it's weirder than that too. No one edit this out. I need people to know what, what I've been forced to endure. You just like literally did that into the microphone.
Starting point is 01:21:36 It was hard. I had to. I'm sorry. I can see Robert right now and he wiped his nose on the mic and he was like, licked it. You licked Robert Evans. He licked it. All of this gets edited out. Now,
Starting point is 01:21:53 many Hindu nationalists were very bullish about the Nazis because Great Britain owned India and ruled it as a brutal colonial oppressor. And they figured, you know, the enemy and my enemy, right? Yeah. Not all of them felt this way. There were a lot of Hindu nationalists who were against the Nazis because they were like, well, but they're Nazis. So again, I'm going to paint everybody with the same brush. Yeah. But Savitri got along very well with the set of Hindu
Starting point is 01:22:18 nationalists who were like, yeah, the Nazis seem good. Um, and she was particularly taken with Dr. Asit Krishna Mukherjee, one of India's few actual committed Nazis. In 1937 and 38 Mukherjee started to publish a bi-monthly pro-Nazi magazine, The New Mercury. Savitri met him in early 1938 and they didn't instantly fall in love. Um, but she fell in love with his mind. She was probably bisexual, but certainly wasn't interested in Mukherjee in any way, but she falls in love with this guy's Nazism, basically.
Starting point is 01:22:54 They're that kind of attached. So they're in, God, that's so, I mean. Yeah, it's not great. Yeah, that's bleak, because it's like, I mean, if you're gonna marry a Nazi, and you're not even attracted to them, no excuse. No excuse either way, but you know what I mean. She has a little bit of an excuse, but we're getting to it.
Starting point is 01:23:16 So, she loves- You are cutting this lady all kinds of slack, Robert. I'm just explaining her. Do you have a crush? Now, so she doesn't, they don't get together right away. She loves his understanding of Nazi ideology and particularly his emphasis on the myths of the old Aryans. And Mukherjee was like obsessed with the Thule society, the Thule society, and it acquired a lot of their occult writing. So he's like that kind of nerd. And Mukherjee seems to like
Starting point is 01:23:42 genuinely appreciate Savitri's ideas and the fact that she was just as much of a nerd for Nazism as he was. But he was baffled by her insistence on staying in India while Nazi Germany like rose to the heights of its power. In early 1939, he asked her, What have you been doing in India all these years with your ideas and your potentialities? Wasting your time and energy. Go back to Europe where duty calls you. Go and help the rebirth of Aryan heathen, where there are still Aryans strong and wide awake. Go to him who is truly life and resurrection, the leader of the third Reich.
Starting point is 01:24:13 Go at once, next year will be too late." And he was kind of right about that. But Savitri was convinced that she could do, yeah, yeah. I'm like, well, historically, okay. Yeah. Savitri though was convinced that she could do more for the cause of Nazism in India than in Germany. She'd become close with members of the Rashtriya Swayam Savik Sangh or RSS,
Starting point is 01:24:35 an Indi, a Hindu nationalist movement that were very similar to the Nazis. The founder or one of the founders, K.B. Hedgwar formed the group to defend Hindu society from daily onslaughts by outsiders, and he included Muslim Indians as members of that group. Like all fascist organizations, the RSS had a uniform, khaki shorts, a white shirt, and a black cap. RSS members met daily to train with bamboo beatsticks called lathis, and to learn about Hindutva, Hindu nationalism. In 1939, Savitri wrote a warning to the Hindus. The book's foreword was written by G.D.
Starting point is 01:25:09 Savarkar, brother to one of the co-founders of the RSS. And according to an article by South Asian affairs analyst, Peter Friedrich, quote, Devi advanced V.D. Savarkar's thesis of Hindutva, that India is a Hindu nation of Hindu people and only for Hindu people. She claimed that Hindu society is India itself, called Hinduism the national religion of India, and suggested that Hindus should tell non-Hindus, we represent India, not you. Therefore, India is ours, not yours. She urged Hindus to recover along with their national consciousness, their military virtues of old,
Starting point is 01:25:42 to re-become a military race. The method, she said, should be the organization of the young men and pledge-bound military-like batches with Hindu nationalism as their only ideal. And here's where I pause to note that the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, is a member of the RSS. A warning to Hindus is still considered to be a deeply influential text within the Hindu nationalist movement and the RSS. Modi probably read it as a child influential text within the Hindu nationalist movement and the RSS. Modi probably read it as a child. And a list of his crimes and the thousands of murders
Starting point is 01:26:10 and mosque bombings and beatings carried out by Hindu nationalists against Indian Muslims would go beyond the scope of this episode. But it is worth noting that the current authoritarian lurch by India, the world's largest democracy, owes at least a decent amount to the work of Savitri Devi. So that's cool. You're in love with her, Robert.
Starting point is 01:26:27 Oh my God. I mean, it is a sign of where this is going that I kind of glossed over the fact that she played a role in the establishment of what's starting to become a fascist dictatorship in India. We just have so much extra ground to cover. We have so much to cover. We don't have time for the fascist dictatorship today.
Starting point is 01:26:48 We have some time, but yeah. Okay, okay, well, we'll make time. We'll make time for the fascist dictatorship. In 1940, Britain and Germany went to war. Savitri's extremist beliefs were well known at this point, and she was forced to marry Mukherji in order to stay in the country. So that's why they get married.
Starting point is 01:27:02 It's basically a green card thing, yeah. Got it. She described it as a seculous marriage, primarily to allow her to stay in the country. So that's why they get married. It's a green card thing. Yeah. She described it as a sexless marriage, primarily to allow her to stay in the country. And she did what she could for Nazism while in India, spying on British military positions for the access and facilitating communication between Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the national Indian army, a pro axis group and the Japanese government. In a different world, these contributions might've played a role in a Japanese invasion of India. But World War II went the way it did, and Hitler eventually shot himself in a bunker to avoid capture. I'm familiar with this. Savitri learned of his death
Starting point is 01:27:33 through an overheard conversation from two Muslim men on the Maribar coast. She was inconsolable for days over the death of her hero and the end of the belief system she had dedicated her life to championing. But Mukherjee told her not to worry. This was merely part of the cycle of her hero and the end of the belief system she had dedicated her life to championing. But Mukherji told her not to worry. This was merely part of the cycle of ages, and the dark age brought on by Hitler's defeat would someday end. And likewise, Jamie, part one of this episode must now end. But this dark age will continue on Thursday with part two of the story of Savitri Devi. No, okay. How you doing, Jamie? I'm okay. I'm just unclenching. That's important.
Starting point is 01:28:14 For the next two minutes, and then we can talk about it again. I gotta pee. ABK, always be clenching. Yeah, go, plug your pluggables first. Oh, right. Leave that in. I want people to know that I had to pee. Transparency. I had to pee. And also leave in Robert blowing his nose on the mic and licking it off.
Starting point is 01:28:33 Yeah, Chris, leave that in. No, that's going to be horrible. Chris, you can edit out the part where Robert is like yum delicious after licking his own snot off the mic, but everything else should probably stay in. I feel like this is legally abuse. You could probably report me to HR. Could be fun. Could be fun. My Twitter is jamiloftushelp and my Instagram is at jamichristsuperstar and I'm touring for the better part of February. You can go to my website, jamieloftesisinnocent.com to find out where.
Starting point is 01:29:10 Yay. Yeah. And you can find Sophie on Twitter by finding her at y underscore Sophie underscore y. And that's it. That's all you can find of us online. Which are on behind the bastards.com, including the full free text of Hitler's priestess. If you want to read this book, the episodes over go stop the French from murdering cats. Yes. Great. Danielle Moody here, host of the Woke F Daily podcast.
Starting point is 01:29:54 We've been with iHeart for a year and what a year it has been. As we head deeper into 2024 and yet another life changing election cycle, Woke F Daily is here to keep you sane and woke. Make Woke AF Daily your podcast destination for 2024 election news and analysis. Listen to Woke AF Daily season five on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 01:30:20 I used to have so many men. How this beguiling woman in her 50s. She looked like a million bucks. Scams a bunch of famous athletes out of untold fortunes. Nearly $10 million was all gone. It's just unbelievable. Hide your money in your old Richmond because she is on the prowl. Listen to Queen of the Con, Season 5, The Athlet the athlete whisperer on the iHeartRadio app,
Starting point is 01:30:46 Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, hi, I'm Rachel Zoe, and my podcast, Climbing in Heels, is back and better than ever. You might know me from the Rachel Zoe project, or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist. And guess what? I'm still just as obsessed with all things fashion, beauty, and business.
Starting point is 01:31:05 Climbing in Heels is all about celebrating the stories of extraordinary women, and this season is here to bring you a weekly dose of glamour, inspiration, and fun. Listen to Climbing in Heels every Friday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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