Andrew Hamilton
January 9, 2011
It seems highly significant that so many who become active in the racialist cause finally feel more or less compelled to search for a spiritual foundation upon which to solidly ground their beliefs and ultimately their entire approach to life.
Cosmotheism, the Church of the Creator, Christian Identity, Norse paganism . . . the list could be extended.
One extension that should be briefly examined, if only because it is so startling and counterintuitive, is the deification of Adolf Hitler. Savitri Devi was of this school—and it was Pierce who reprinted her The Lightning and the Sun in Issue No. 1 (Spring 1966) of George Lincoln Rockwell’s intellectual journal, National Socialist World, of which he was editor.
Pierce authored a cover story on Hitler, “The Measure of Greatness,” in National Vanguard No. 110 (March-April 1989), in which he identified the German leader as “the greatest man of our era—a man who dared more and achieved more, who set his aim higher and climbed higher, who felt more deeply and stirred the souls of those around him more mightily, who was more closely attuned to the Life Force which permeates our cosmos and gives it meaning and purpose, and did more to serve that Life Force, than any other man of our times.”
He observed that “Adolf Hitler started literally from nothing and through the exercise of a superhuman will created the physical basis for the realization of his vision.” This same philosophical idealism—semi-miraculous materialization or creation out of mind and spirit—is captured in the title of Leni Riefenstahl’s famous film The Triumph of the Will.
In “Lincoln Rockwell: A National Socialist Life” (National Socialist World, Winter 1967, subsequently republished as a booklet), Pierce refers to Hitler mystically as “The Leader.”
Rockwell biographer William Schmaltz describes religious ceremonies involving photos of Hitler, the National Socialist flag, candles, and related paraphernalia, and in his Rockwell booklet Pierce mentions a series of intense dreams Rockwell experienced “nearly every night for a period of several weeks” while working as an advertising salesman in Atlanta during the winter of 1957-58. In each of them he was ushered into a small room in which Adolf Hitler was waiting, alone. The moment they met, the dreams ended.
“Always a skeptic where the supernatural was concerned,” Pierce writes, “he was certainly not a man easily influenced by omens. But there can be no doubt that he attached special significance” to the dreams.
“One can most easily interpret these dreams as a case of autosuggestion,” Pierce continues, “but in the light of later developments Rockwell considered them as a symbolic summons, a beckoning onto the path for which he was then still groping.” Rockwell never wrote about the dreams and related them to only a few people.
Hitler deification has been perpetuated to the present by Matt Koehl and the Wisconsin-based New Order. Koehl was formerly a top Rockwell lieutenant. It is quite interesting to examine their material from the religious point of view.
This search for a spiritual foundation, though initially provoked, I suspect, by the intense persecution, discrimination, and hatred to which whites have been subjected for more than a century, is probably necessary if we are to stop making “mistakes based on shortsightedness, mistakes from not being able to give any real weight to anything but the immediate problem, mistakes from not thinking far enough ahead.”
In Pierce’s account, it was the snide, genocidal hatred expressed by brainwashed white kids and a Jewish boy that provoked his own search for first principles.
Finally, I should add that Professor Robert S. Griffin’s intellectual biography, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds (2001), contains several informative chapters elaborating upon the development of Pierce’s spiritual views: Chap. 4, “George Bernard Shaw,” Chap. 5, “Adolf Hitler,” Chap. 13, “Our Cause,” and Chap. 14, “Cosmotheism.”
In the last-mentioned chapter, Pierce describes how the Cosmotheist Community (later the Cosmotheist Community Church) evolved out of Sunday night lectures he gave in Arlington, Virginia in the early 1970s.
Sometimes he talked about race, sometimes about religion. Members of his audience responded differently—some were more interested in race, others in religion. When he talked about religion, “I could see the eyes glaze over in the first group.”
So he split the group up.
He said, “I also talked to the Cosmotheist group about how anything that has ever made an impact and shaped people’s lives has been more than just an idea. It has been an idea with a concrete embodiment. It not only had a doctrine, it had rituals and songs and priestly vestments, things like that.”
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