Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #843 Interview (#6) with Peter Levenda about “The Hitler Legacy”

Dave Emory’s entire life­time of work is avail­able on a flash dri­ve that can be obtained here. The new dri­ve is a 32-giga­byte dri­ve that is cur­rent as of the pro­grams and arti­cles post­ed by 12/19/2014. The new dri­ve (avail­able for a tax-deductible con­tri­bu­tion of $65.00 or more) con­tains FTR #827.  (The pre­vi­ous flash dri­ve was cur­rent through the end of May of 2012 and con­tained FTR #748.)

You can sub­scribe to e‑mail alerts from Spitfirelist.com HERE

You can sub­scribe to RSS feed from Spitfirelist.com HERE.

You can sub­scribe to the com­ments made on pro­grams and posts–an excel­lent source of infor­ma­tion in, and of, itself HERE.

Lis­ten: MP3

This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: The sixth of sev­er­al inter­views with Peter Lev­en­da, this pro­gram sets forth the his­tor­i­cal and ide­o­log­i­cal foun­da­tion for the post­war per­pet­u­a­tion and oper­a­tion of Nazism–“The Hitler Lega­cy.” Mr. Emory views this book as one of the most impor­tant polit­i­cal vol­umes ever writ­ten.

The the­sis of this remark­able book might be summed up in an excerpt from page 307:

. . . . After World War II, the Amer­i­can peo­ple thought that Nazi Ger­many had been defeat­ed and the “war” was over; this book demon­strates that it nev­er was. Instead, we were told that Com­mu­nism was the new threat and we had to pull out all the stops to pre­vent a Com­mu­nist takeover of the coun­try. And so our mil­i­tary and our intel­li­gence agen­cies col­lab­o­rat­ed with sur­viv­ing Nazis to go after Com­mu­nists. We refused to pur­sue world­wide right wing ter­ror groups and assas­sins. After all, they were killing Com­mu­nists and left­ists; they were doing us a ser­vice. Like Hoover and the Mafia, the CIA refused to believe a Nazi Under­ground exist­ed even as they col­lab­o­rat­ed with it (via the Gehlen Orga­ni­za­tion and the like).

The whole thrust of this book has been that Amer­i­can lead­ers in busi­ness, finance, media, and pol­i­tics col­lab­o­rat­ed with Nazis before, dur­ing, and after the war. The West­’s share in the ‘blame” for Al-Qae­da, et al, goes back a long way–before Eisenhower–to a cabal of extrem­ist US Army gen­er­als and emi­gre East­ern Euro­peans who did­n’t have much of a prob­lem with Nazism since they feared Com­mu­nism more. The Church, the Tibetans, the Japan­ese, the Ger­mans, the Croatians–and the Americans–all felt that Com­mu­nism was the greater dan­ger, long before WWII. We enlist­ed war crim­i­nals to fight on our side. We appro­pri­at­ed the idea of glob­al jihad from the Nazis and their WW I pre­de­ces­sors. We amped up their plan to weaponize reli­gion and con­vinced Mus­lims, who hat­ed each oth­er, to band togeth­er to fight Com­mu­nism. And when Afghanistan was lib­er­at­ed and the Sovi­et Union was defeat­ed?

Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001. . . .

Resum­ing a point of dis­cus­sion from FTR #842, we fur­ther devel­op the nature of Tibetan Bud­dhism, cer­tain sim­i­lar­i­ties with Nazi phi­los­o­phy and occult beliefs, and how this played into the devel­op­ment of the Dalai Lama’s oper­a­tional links to some tru­ly “inter­est­ing” ele­ments.

Advanc­ing analy­sis of the “weaponiza­tion of reli­gion” and ele­ments of Bud­dhism, in par­tic­u­lar, Peter high­lights the lit­tle-known but pro­found fas­cist influ­ence on, and sup­port from, the Zen Bud­dhist com­mu­ni­ty.

 Pur­suant to the dis­cus­sion of “weaponized reli­gion,” Peter sets forth his the­sis that Nazism was a form of cult or spir­i­tu­al belief. As we have seen, Nazi phi­los­o­phy res­onat­ed effec­tive­ly with some aspects of “glob­al jihadism,” Tibetan Bud­dhism and wartime prac­ti­cioners of Zen Bud­dhism. Lis­ten­ers should remem­ber that ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence co-opt­ed “weaponized reli­gion” dur­ing the Cold war, includ­ing glob­al jihadism and Tibetan Buddhism.Embodying the con­cept of Nazism as a cult is a remark­able indi­vid­ual named Miguel Ser­ra­no, whose involve­ment stretch­es from Pinochet’s Chile and the world of Colo­nia Dig­nidad to the milieu of the Dalai Lama and Nazi occult per­son­ages such as Sav­it­ri Devi.Pro­gram High­lights Include:

  • Zen lumi­nary D.T. Suzuk­i’s enor­mous post­war influ­ence on the Zen prac­ti­tion­er com­mu­ni­ty.
  • Karl­fried Dur­ck­hiem’s influ­ence on the same community–both, f0r exam­ple, influ­enced Alan Watts. (One should NOT make the mis­take of infer­ring that Watts was a fas­cist or Nazi in any way.)
  • Suzuk­i’s belief that the Japan­ese philosophy/discipline of Bushi­do (“the way of the war­rior”) dove­tailed effec­tive­ly with Zen Bud­dhist prac­tice and out­look.
  • The “weaponiza­tion of reli­gion” as a form of mass mind con­trol.
  • The appar­ent influ­ence of D.T. Suzuk­i’s anti-Semit­ic views on the Third Reich’s “mar­tial spir­it.”

1. Resum­ing a point of dis­cus­sion from FTR #842, we fur­ther devel­op the nature of Tibetan Bud­dhism, cer­tain sim­i­lar­i­ties with Nazi phi­los­o­phy and occult beliefs, and how this played into the devel­op­ment of the Dalai Lama’s oper­a­tional links to some tru­ly “inter­est­ing” ele­ments.

The Hitler Lega­cy by Peter Lev­en­da; IBIS Press [HC]; Copy­right 2014 by Peter Lev­en­da; ISBN 978–0‑89254–210‑9; pp. 244–245.

. . . . Both Hitler and the Dalai Lama were sec­u­lar rulers of their respec­tive coun­tries. Both had been the spir­i­tu­al rulers of their respec­tive coun­tries. Both had been the spir­i­tu­al rulers of their peo­ples, as well. Both revered the swasti­ka as a sym­bol of their iden­ti­ty. And both were fight­ing Com­mu­nism: Hitler against Rus­sia, and the Dalai Lama against Chi­na. And just as Nazi offi­cers were incor­po­rat­ed into the US and British intel­li­gence oper­a­tions against Rus­sia, so were Tibetan polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary lead­ers incor­po­rat­ed into Amer­i­can intel­li­gence and para­mil­i­tary oper­a­tions against Chi­na. The fol­low­ers of both Hitler and the Dalai Lama were (and are) moved by ecsta­t­ic wor­ship of their lead­ers and dreams of a par­a­disi­a­cal future. . . .

. . . . This might have been con­so­nant with an eso­teric tra­di­tion in Tibet, enshrined in the sem­i­nal work of Tibetan Bud­dhism, the Kalachakra Tantra. In this work, men­tion is made of the Kal­ki: a kind of God-King that will storm out of Shamb­ha­la (the secret, hid­den king­dom in the Himalayas made famous in the film Shangri-La) and put to waste all non-Bud­dhists, in a jihad wor­thy the most insane fan­tasies of frus­trat­ed ter­ror­ists every­where. The Dalai Lama is known to be fas­ci­nat­ed with the machin­ery of war, as he him­self men­tioned dur­ing the New York Times inter­view above-ref­er­enced.

It would be a stretch to accuse the Tibetans of the same type of war crimes of which the Nazis have been charged. There is no indi­ca­tion of geno­cide or “eth­nic cleans­ing” as a result of Tibetan poli­cies, for instance. How­ev­er, if we sub­tract geno­cide from the polit­i­cal incli­na­tions of both the Nazis and Tibetans as rep­re­sent­ed by the Dalai Lama, we are left with the uneasy feel­ing that there was much they had in common.Both the Nazis and the Tibetan Bud­dhists rep­re­sent reli­gions that are non-Abra­ham­ic in nature. The Nazis embraced a kind of neo-pagan­ism as their spir­i­tu­al resource, and with it a rejec­tion of the eth­i­cal and moral ideals of Judaism, Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam.

It should be not­ed, how­ev­er, that the Kalachakra Tantra–which forms the back­bone of the type of Bud­dhism pro­mul­gat­ed by the Dalai Lama–includes sim­i­lar ideas. there is a patent rejec­tion of non-Bud­dhist reli­gions and the promise of the appear­ance of the Kal­ki: an avatar of Vish­nu and the last ruler of the Kali Yuga (the dark age in which we present­ly live). Kal­ki was asso­ci­at­ed with Hitler by Miguel Ser­ra­no, and by the Indi­an nation­al­ist leader Sub­has Chan­dra Bose, among oth­ers. The Kal­ki would come out of his myth­i­cal king­dom of Shamb­ha­la at some point in the future and cleanse the world of non-Bud­dhists in a major, apoc­a­lyp­tic-style con­fla­gra­tion. This seems a tri­fle incon­sis­tent with the con­cept of “mer­cy.” The Dalai Lama is con­sid­ered to be an incar­na­tion of Akalovites­vara, the Indi­an God of Mer­cy and Com­pas­sion; per­haps some­thing is lost in the trans­la­tion.

We do not see the Dalai Lama sit­ting down and smil­ing benign­ly with Com­mu­nists. We do see him embrac­ing Nazis. One can imag­ine that the Sea of Com­pas­sion that is the Dalai Lama has man­aged to bestow mer­cy on even these unre­pen­tant war crim­i­nals and fear-mon­gers, and per­haps that is the les­son he wish­es to teach us; but that is not a les­son he has the moral right to teach. . . .

2. Advanc­ing analy­sis of the “weaponiza­tion of reli­gion” and ele­ments of Bud­dhism, in par­tic­u­lar, Peter high­lights the lit­tle-known but pro­found fas­cist influ­ence on, and sup­port from, the Zen Bud­dhist com­mu­ni­ty.

We note:

  • Zen lumi­nary D.T. Suzuk­i’s enor­mous post­war influ­ence on the Zen prac­ti­tion­er com­mu­ni­ty.
  • Karl­fried Dur­ck­hiem’s influ­ence on the same community–both, f0r exam­ple, influ­enced Alan Watts. (One should NOT make the mis­take of infer­ring that Watts was a fas­cist or Nazi in any way.)
  • Suzuk­i’s belief that the Japan­ese philosophy/discipline of Bushi­do (“the way of the war­rior”) dove­tailed effec­tive­ly with Zen Bud­dhist prac­tice and out­look.
  • The “weaponiza­tion of reli­gion” as a form of mass mind con­trol.

The Hitler Lega­cy by Peter Lev­en­da; IBIS Press [HC]; Copy­right 2014 by Peter Lev­en­da; ISBN 978–0‑89254–210‑9; pp. 250–252.

. . . . This is a rel­a­tive­ly new branch of reli­gious stud­ies, one that is con­tro­ver­sial. It is  sure to be upset­ting to many peo­ple as they real­ize that one of the most revered authors on Zen Buddhism–D.T. Suzu­ki (1870–1966)–was, in fact, a devot­ed fas­cist who glo­ri­fied  the role of the Japan­ese war­rior in the con­quest of Chi­na.

What may come as a sur­prise to many oth­ers is the fact–amply sup­port­ed by documentation–that one of the West­ern world’s most respect­ed inter­preters of Zen Bud­dhism, Karl­fried Graf Dur­ck­heim, was a Nazi par­ty mem­ber, SA man since 1933, and the head of Nazi pro­pa­gan­da in Japan, report­ing direct­ly to Reich For­eign Min­is­ter Ribben­trop. A com­mit­ted Nazi, Dur­ck­heim was even­tu­al­ly arrest­ed by Allied forces after the fall of Japan and sen­tenced to six­teen months in prison.

These two men–Suzuki and Durckheim–became fast friends for the dura­tion of the war. they had a great deal in com­mon, and Zen was the glue that found them togeth­er. Bushido–the “way of the warrior”–had res­o­nance for both the Nazis and the Japan­ese nation­al­ists. The lat­ter were slaugh­ter­ing their way across the length and breadth of Asia. Zen Bud­dhism, like Islam, had become weaponized.

The crit­i­cal point to take away from this dis­cus­sion is the fact that religion–religious orga­ni­za­tions, influ­en­tial cler­gy, even reli­gious sen­ti­ments could become the ser­vant of the state. Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, often con­sid­ered the high­est form of human expe­ri­ence, becomes rel­e­gat­ed to being anoth­er tool in a gov­ern­ment arse­nal designed for  caus­ing the vio­lent end of anoth­er human being and the vic­to­ry of the state over anoth­er nation, eth­nic group, or reli­gious enti­ty. This is, after all, what a “holy war” is: men and women unit­ed under one reli­gion, sect, or denom­i­na­tion slaugh­ter­ing men and women unit­ed under anoth­er. It becomes dif­fi­cult to dif­fer­en­ti­ate whether reli­gion is the cause or the medi­um for vio­lent con­flict; from the point of view of both the vic­tims and the per­pe­tra­tors, it prob­a­bly does­n’t mat­ter.

In the case of Bud­dhism, it seems counter-intu­itive that a phi­los­o­phy whose most exalt­ed prac­ti­tion­ers refuse to ear meat or to harm any liv­ing thing could be recruit­ed to con­vince a lay pop­u­la­tion to take up arms and invade anoth­er coun­try, mur­der­ing its inhab­i­tants, and claim­ing that this is to con­sis­tent with what the Bud­dha taught. Yet this weaponiza­tion of reli­gion is pre­cise­ly what took place in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry under the influ­ence of extreme nation­al­ism in Europe, the Mid­dle East, and Asia. Japan­ese nation­al­ism was seen as anal­o­gous to–if not iden­ti­cal with–the nation­al­ist move­ment in Ger­many, and observers and com­men­ta­tors not­ed this sim­i­lar­i­ty favor­ably.

Bri­an Daizen Vic­to­ria has been writ­ing about this phe­nom­e­non in a num­ber of peer-reviewed journals–notably The Asia-Pacif­ic Jour­nal–and has pub­lished a num­ber of books on the sub­ject. Speak­ing Japan­ese and hav­ing access to the previously–unknown war writ­ings of D.T. Suzu­ki and many oth­er Zen mas­ters, he has recorded–not with­out controversy–the under­stand­ing of Zen ini­ti­ates that Bushi­do (the “way of the war­rior”) and Zen Bud­dhism are inex­tri­ca­bly linked. Fur­ther, that mind­less devo­tion to the state and fol­low its orders–no mat­ter what they are–constitute the high­est form of Bud­dhist self­less­ness. The writ­ings of these Japan­ese monks and schol­ars on the sub­ject of sui­cide of sui­cide, and the will­ing­ness to face death and lose one’s life in the ser­vice of the Empire can be com­pared to those of Islamist sui­cide bombers and ter­ror­ists, with lit­tle dis­tor­tion between the two. What dif­fer­ence, after all, is there between a Pales­tin­ian in a sui­cide vest and the Kamikaze pilots of Japan?. . . . They are both los­ing their lives for a high­er cause, and caus­ing as much human-dev­as­ta­tion as pos­si­ble in the process.

. . . . The manip­u­la­tion of spir­i­tu­al beliefs and sen­ti­ments by state and non-state actors alike is noth­ing less than what they used to call “mind con­trol” back in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The weaponiza­tion of reli­gion is a means of con­trol­ling (and weaponiz­ing) the human psy­che on a mas­sive scale, using ter­mi­nol­o­gy and sym­bol­ism that are wide­ly rec­og­nized by the mass­es and not spe­cif­ic  to any indi­vid­ual. Reli­gious feel­ings are strong, but they are also ambigu­ous and large­ly resis­tant to log­ic and ver­bal­iza­tion, and thus sub­ject to re-inter­pre­ta­tion and redi­rec­tion by a com­pe­tent leader. It is the reli­gious pas­sion itself that is the food of the polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary com­man­der; it mat­ters whether the out­ward man­i­fes­ta­tion of that pas­sion is devo­tion to Jesus or Marx, Bud­dha or the Emper­or. . . .

3. Suzu­ki may have influ­enced the “mar­tial spir­it” of Nazi Ger­many. Suzuk­i’s views on Jews dove­tailed with those of the Third Reich.

The Hitler Lega­cy by Peter Lev­en­da; IBIS Press [HC]; Copy­right 2014 by Peter Lev­en­da; ISBN 978–0‑89254–210‑9; p. 256.

‘. . . . The fact that they have no coun­try is karmic ret­ri­bu­tion on the Jews. Because they have no attach­ment to the land and are wan­der­ers, it is their fate to intrude into state struc­tures cre­at­ed by oth­ers. . . .  In the case of today’s Ger­man peo­ple, they find it extreme­ly dif­fi­cult to accept their coun­try  being dis­turbed by a for­eign race. . . .’

This is essen­tial­ly the Nazi Par­ty line. In fact, as Bri­an Daizen Vic­to­ria notes in the same arti­cle from which the above quo­ta­tion was extract­ed, the edi­tor who wrote the for­ward to Suzuk­i’s book on Bushi­do, pub­lished in 1941, claimed : “Dr. Suzuk­i’s writ­ings are said to have strong­ly influ­enced the mil­i­tary spir­it of Nazi Ger­many.” It would be aston­ish­ing indeed, and not a lit­tle demor­al­iz­ing, to dis­cov­er that Zen Bud­dhism had made the Waf­fen-SS even more coura­geous, more bru­tal, more ded­i­cat­ed than they already were. Per­haps it was the rela­tion­ship between Suzu­ki and Dur­ck­heim that gave greater impe­tus to the pol­l­eniza­tion of these ideas in both cul­tures. . . .

4. Pur­suant to the dis­cus­sion of “weaponized reli­gion,” Peter sets forth his the­sis that Nazism was a form of cult or spir­i­tu­al belief. As we have seen, Nazi phi­los­o­phy res­onat­ed effec­tive­ly with some aspects of “glob­al jihadism,” Tibetan Bud­dhism and wartime prac­ti­cioners of Zen Bud­dhism.

Lis­ten­ers should remem­ber that ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence co-opt­ed “weaponized reli­gion” dur­ing the Cold war, includ­ing glob­al jihadism and Tibetan Bud­dhism.

5. Embody­ing the con­cept of Nazism as a cult is a remark­able indi­vid­ual named Miguel Ser­ra­no, whose involve­ment stretch­es from Pinochet’s Chile and the world of Colo­nia Dig­nidad to the milieu of the Dalai Lama and Nazi occult per­son­ages such as Sav­it­ri Devi.

The Hitler Lega­cy by Peter Lev­en­da; IBIS Press [HC]; Copy­right 2014 by Peter Lev­en­da; ISBN 978–0‑89254–210‑9; pp. 240–243.

. . . . And then there was Miguel Ser­ra­no.

Read­ers of my Unholy Alliance will be famil­iar with the name of Ser­ra­no. A for­mer Chilean ambas­sador to Aus­tria and India, among oth­er post­ings, Ser­ra­no was one of the ear­li­est mem­bers of the Nazi Par­ty in Chile. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, he edit­ed a mag­a­zine called La Nue­va Edad or “The New Age,” which was filled with arti­cles on spir­i­tu­al and polit­i­cal subjects–a kind of South Amer­i­can ver­sion of Order of the New Tem­plars founder Lanz von Lieben­fel­s’s Ostara mag­a­zine that so cap­ti­vat­ed a young Adolf Hitler in Vien­na.

Ser­ra­no devel­oped close friend­ships with such lead­ing lights as Carl G. Jung, the famous Swiss psy­chi­a­trist who has been char­ac­ter­ized as pro-Nazi by some of his crit­ics, and the Ger­man author Her­mann Hesse (Sid­dhar­ta, Step­pen­wolf, Jour­ney to the East), and wrote a book about these rela­tion­ships. What many admir­ers in the Unit­ed States and Europe did not real­ize, how­ev­er, was that Ser­ra­no ws an unre­pen­tant Nazi to the end of his days. His oth­er works–many of which are so far untrans­lat­ed from Span­ish into Eng­lish, and thus unavail­able to the wider audi­ence that would be hor­ri­fied to learn of his allegiances–inlude Hitler: el ulti­mo avatar and El Cor­don Dora­do: works that com­bine Indi­an spir­i­tu­al con­cepts and occultism with emphat­i­cal­ly Nazi race sci­ence–Rassenkunde–and Nazi polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. To Ser­ra­no and to many of his fol­low­ers Hitler was el ulti­mo avatar or “the last avatar”: a demigod appear­ing on earth to pave the way for Ser­ra­no’s “New Age.” This com­bi­na­tion of Asian spir­i­tu­al and eso­teric con­cepts with patent Nazism was not unique to Ser­ra­no, as authors such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke have pont­ed out. Indeed, ear­ly copies of the Asian–inspired works of Mme. Hele­na Blavatsky–founder of the The Theo­soph­i­cal Society–bore the swasti­ka on their cov­ers, not as a nod to Nazism (which did not exist when her books were writ­ten) but to the ancient Asian use of the sym­bol which nev­er­thelss was adopt­ed by the Nazis as emblem­at­ic of the Aryan race Blavatsky describes. . . .

. . . . Pho­tographs of Ser­ra­no with the Dalai Lama are as numer­ous as those of Bruno Beger or Heirich Har­rer with the Dalai Lama are as numer­ous as those of Bruno Beger or Hein­rich Har­rer with the Dalai Lama. Ser­ra­no had met the Tibetan leader dur­ing his tenure as ambas­sador to India, and lat­er adopt­ed many Tibetan con­cepts in his own works. . . .

Discussion

One comment for “FTR #843 Interview (#6) with Peter Levenda about “The Hitler Legacy””

  1. In May 2013 “His Holi­ness” the Dali Lama was the com­mence­ment speak­er for Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty and par­took of the fes­tiv­i­ties at the Mer­cedes-Benz Super­dome receiv­ing an hon­orary doc­tor­ate.

    “Dalai Lama talks glob­al­ly, boo­gies local­ly at Tulane com­mence­ment”

    http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2013/05/dalai_lama_talks_globally_part.html

    I am think­ing about writ­ing to Tulane to con­grat­u­late the insti­tu­tion for being so pro­gres­sive and to sug­gest accom­plished researcher Dave Emory, and respect­ed authors Ed Haslam and Peter Lev­en­da as future hon­orary doc­tor­ate recip­i­ents and com­mence­ment speak­ers.

    The Hitler Lega­cy is an excel­lent book.

    http://www.thehitlerlegacy.com/

    Posted by GK | April 14, 2015, 4:26 pm

Post a comment