Hitler and his God

Parallels and Contrasts

There are striking parallels between the conceptions of Adolf Hitler and the vision of Sri Aurobindo. After all, Hitler saw himself as the announcer and initiator of a new era in human history which was succeeding the millennium of the Christian era; it was his intention to create a race of supermen who were to be the lords of a new world; this race of supermen would create and rule their new world supported by their faith in their race and the mission of this race; their domination would ultimately be global and last a thousand years, in other words forever; the supermen would, moreover, become always purer and nobler because they would be freed of the peril of degradation by lower races and especially by the demonic race that was the lowest of all, the Jews. As Sri Aurobindo’s vision was that of a new era initiating the transformation of the human race into a race of higher beings he also called “supermen”, and as these higher beings would populate a new world, the expression of the higher consciousness which they would embody, it could be said that in broad outline Hitler’s vision was the shadow of Sri Aurobindo’s vision. Considerations of this sort have indeed led some to declare Hitler an “avatar”, i.e. a divine incarnation come to initiate a new age (cf. Miguel Serrano: Hitler – El ultimo Avatar).

Yet, where Sri Aurobindo’s vision is intrinsically progressive, Hitler’s view and initiatives were retrograde, intending to lead humanity back to an era of barbarism which it was supposed to have left definitively behind. Hitler’s “new man” was educated to be blindly obedient and no longer subject to feelings or emotions; he was trained to behave in a superior, ruthless way towards people not of his kind, and to consider hardship and war as his element, death as his glorification. He took pride in being hardhearted and violent to the point of cruelty. His identity was expressed by his uniform, his usefulness to the Volk by his regimentation. What Hitler’s superman would die for, he knew; what he would live for remains an enigma. Would racial pride, some resurrected folklore and a religion of the masses suffice? Could the life of a superior racial robot be satisfactory? And who would be their living god after Hitler had left the earthly stage?

In contrast with this terrible prospect of a world ruled by racial robots, Sri Aurobindo stressed the crucial importance of the individual, always of a higher consciousness than the group or the mass, and the centre or “dynamo” of the cosmic forces in humanity. “The communal mind holds things subconsciously at first or, if consciously, then in a confused chaotic manner; it is only through the individual mind that the mass can arrive at a clear knowledge and creation of it held in its subconscient self. Thinkers, historians, sociologists who belittle the individual and would like to lose him in the mass or think of him chiefly as a cell, an atom, have got hold only of the obscurer side of the truth of Nature’s workings in humanity. It is because man is not like the material formations of Nature or like the animal, because she intends in him a more and more conscious evolution, that individuality is so much developed in him and so absolutely important and indispensable.” 972

“The principle of individualism is the liberty of the human being regarded as a separate existence to develop himself and fulfil his life, satisfy his mental tendencies, emotional and vital needs and physical being according to his own desire governed by his reason; it admits no other limit to this right and this liberty except the obligation to respect the same individual liberty and right in others … In this idea of life, as with the individual, so with the nation, each has the inherent right to manage its own affairs freely or, if it wills, to mismanage them freely and not to be interfered with in its rights and liberties so long as it does not interfere with the rights and liberties of other nations.” In these formulations of Sri Aurobindo one hears a direct echo of Kant and the ideals of the Enlightenment.

As we have seen repeatedly, Fascism as a whole and Nazism in particular were a revolt against everything the Enlightenment stood for, especially the idea of “progress”. The message of Sri Aurobindo lay precisely in the possibility and the necessity of an upward transformation of the human being, the only way of real progress. But this is a most difficult undertaking, which may be the reason why it was never tried out before. Now Mother Earth seemed to have reached a point in the human race where the conditions had grown opportune to try the impossible. Were not all indications around 1900 pointing towards a momentous change, for better or worse?

Sri Aurobindo strongly asserted the importance of the ideals of the Enlightenment to sustain the impetus of the forward movement in humanity. The new values – the “democratic trinity” of liberty, equality and fraternity – had to be made permanent fixtures in the psychological structure of humanity. The ways of “the forward evolution” had to be kept open. “What we have to see is on which side men and nations put themselves; if they put themselves on the right side, they at once make themselves instruments of the Divine purpose in spite of all defects, errors, wrong movements and actions which are common to human nature and all human collectivities. The victory of one side (the Allies) would keep the path open for the evolutionary forces; the victory of the other side would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished.” 973