The Dark Age
Editor’s Note:
The following is an excerpt from chapter 16 of Savitri Devi’s The Lightning and the Sun. The title is editorial.
A more and more glaring sign of fate is to be observed in the shocking increase of the population of the globe from year to year,[1] especially in the increase of the lower races and in the rapid bastardisation of the higher ones and the resulting accelerated fall of the whole of mankind to the level of an enormous unthinking herd.
I have, in another part of this book, already mentioned the fact as one of the main characteristics of the advancing Dark Age. In the Golden Age—symbolised, in Christian Tradition, in the much older myth of the “Garden of Eden”—extremely few people, but all god-like, lived in a lovely world, covered (wherever the climate permitted) with a luxuriant vegetation that nobody destroyed, and full of beautiful, free, and friendly animals that nobody killed or injured. However; with the appearance of what I have called the superstition of “man,” expression of the oldest human selfishness and conceit—i.e., meanness—which cut him off the harmonious brotherhood of living creatures and caused his fall from the Golden Age state of existence, man ceased to be the righteous king of Creation to become, gradually, its tyrant and, more and more—as myriads of years rolled by and as he sunk into the Dark Age—its torturer. And his rebellion against the divinity of Nature led him, along with this, to despise Nature’s great purpose. A short-sighted quest for indiscriminate individual enjoyment made him indifferent to the call to supermanhood. And he degraded himself ever more. Now, at the end of the Dark Age, the Edenic picture is completely reversed. Upon the surface of this unfortunate planet, which is losing with alarming rapidity its once so broad and thick mantle of forests; of this unfortunate planet, where whole species of proud wild creatures—the aristocracy of the animal world—have already been or are being, with no less speed, wiped away—killed off to the last—one notices an increasingly obnoxious and steadily expanding swarm of dreary (when not positively ugly) vulgar, silly, worthless two-legged mammals. And the more worthless they are, the quicker they breed. The sickly and the dull have more children than the healthy and bright; the inferior races, and the people who have no race at all, definitely more than the 100 percent Aryan; and the downright rotten—afflicted both with hereditary diseases and racially indefinable blood—are, more often than not, terrifyingly fertile.
And everything is done to encourage that mad increase in number and that constant loss in quality. Everything is done to keep the sickly, the crippled, the freaks of nature, the unfit to work and unfit to live, from dying. One “prolongs” as much as possible the lives of the incurable. One inflicts torture upon thousands of lovely, innocent, healthy animals, in the hope of discovering “new treatments,” so that deficient men, whom Nature has, anyhow, condemned to death, might last a few months—or a few weeks longer; so that they be patched up, or artificially given an illusion of vitality . . . while remaining a burden to the healthy. And that, whoever they may be; just because they are “human beings.” Hospitals and asylums—bluntly described as such, or politely christened “homes” are full of such dregs of humanity, old and young . . . while the healthy are (physically and morally) made unhealthy through the conditions of life imposed upon them by a false civilisation: through joyless work and overcrowded houses; lack of privacy; lack of leisure; through compulsory inoculations and cleverly advertised unnatural food; through nerve-wracking mass-music, not to speak of a soul-killing, brain-softening mass-propaganda exalting unnatural values. Hospitals and asylums are, after slaughterhouses, one of the most depressing features of the advanced “Kali Yuga” or Dark Age; the one which would automatically provoke the greatest disgust in the heart of a strong man of the beginning of this Age, not to mention one out of the preceding “Dvapara Yuga” and a fortiori out of a remoter Age, if such men could come back as they once were.
But why speak of hospitals and asylums? The streets are full of dregs of humanity, at least full of bastards and of sub-men. One only has to look at the faces one sees in the overcrowded buses, or in the cinemas and dancing halls and cafes in large towns, nay even in small ones, even in the countryside, everywhere, save in those lands in which the dominant race is relatively pure. It is a pitiful sight; a pitiful world; a world up-side-down; a world in which the average cat or dog is, as such, immeasurably healthier, more beautiful—more perfect—than the average man or woman and a fortiori than the average post-1945 state ruler; nearer to the ideal archetype of his species than most present-day human beings and especially than the official (and the hidden) leaders of the present-day “free world”—President Eisenhower (or rather, Mr. Baruch), Churchill, Mendès-France, etc. (let alone their most obedient servants Konrad Adenauer, Theodor Heuss, and Co.)—ever were to the ideal archetype of man, God’s masterpiece.
If only the ugly sub-men were capable of lofty thoughts—or simply of thought—that would be something! But they are not. And their leaders are worse than they, not better. True, they all speak of “free thinking”; speak of it, and write about it. They criticise their former friends (the Communists) for “killing individual thought.” Yet they are themselves the first ones to lack both freedom of judgement and individuality. They all have the same views; and the same ideal. Their views are those of the ruling press. Their ideal is to “get on in life,” i.e., to make money and to “be happy,” which means: to enjoy tasty food, fine clothing, lodgings provided with the latest commodities; and, in addition to that, as often as possible, a little drink, a little light music, a little sport, a little love-making. Maybe they call themselves Christians—or Hindus, or anything else. But whatever religion they might profess, their faith is skin-deep. Nothing, absolutely nothing more-than-personal—and, a fortiori, more-than-human—interests them. The one thing they all pray for, when they pray at all, is “peace”; not the unassailable, inner peace of the Best (of which they have not the foggiest experience), but peace in the sense of absence of war; the indefinite prolongation of a “status quo” which allows them to think of tomorrow’s little pleasure without the fear of today’s deadly danger; peace, thanks to which they will, undisturbed—so they hope—be able to go on rotting in the midst of that increasing comfort which technical progress secures them; peace, thanks to which they expect to remain (or gradually to become) happy—in the manner pigs are happy, when they have plenty to eat and clean straw to lie upon.
Accelerated technical progress is, along with accelerated human degeneracy, an all-important feature of the advanced Dark Age.
It is—or seems to be—the “triumph of man” over Nature. And it is interpreted and exalted as such by the sub-men, all the more proud of it that they have nothing else—no real, living culture; no disinterested work or knowledge—to be proud of. It is—or seems to be—the “proof” of man’s superiority over all other sentient beings; the “proof” of his superiority en bloc, regardless of race, for . . . a Negro can drive a motorcar, can’t he? And there are very clever Jewish doctors. It forwards or strengthens the age-old superstition of “man,” which lies at the root of all decay. It is, or seems to be, the way to universal “happiness”; the ideal of those increasing millions—and soon, milliards[2]—who have no ideal. In fact, it helps the ruling powers of the Dark Age, the skilful agents of the forces of disintegration, to keep the millions under their control. For, paradoxical as this may sound, masses who can read and write are easier to enslave than masses who cannot, and nothing is so easy to subdue and to keep down as masses who consider their wireless and television sets and cinema shows as indispensable necessities of life. (The modern men “against Time” know that, as well as the men “in Time.” Only they do not dispose of the inexhaustible financial resources of the latter.)
Technical progress, in all fields in which it does not automatically imply cruelty towards man or beast (or plant),[3] is not a bad thing in itself. Actually, it is not it that makes the Dark Age. What makes the Dark Age is the fall of all but an extreme minority of men to the level of a brainless (and heartless) herd, and, at the same time, their endless increase in number. And technical progress is a curse only inasmuch as it is the most powerful instrument in the hands of all those who, directly or indirectly, encourage that indiscriminate increase and, consequently, forward that herd-mentality (even if they do not explicitly intend to); in the hands of the doctors who keep the weak and deficient and mongrels alive, and do nothing to prevent further such ones from being born; in the hands of the politicians “in Time” who, precisely because they all share—like the doctors—the age-old superstition of “man” and of man’s individual “happiness” at any cost, are opposed to any systematic selection in view of the survival and welfare of the healthiest, let alone to systematic racial selection also, in view of the survival and rule of an all-round biological human aristocracy.
As I said above, technical progress and its wonders could just as easily be put to the service of a decidedly “life-centred” philosophy “against Time”; of an aristocratic doctrine of personal and racial quality, such as National Socialism, if only the exponents of such a doctrine could maintain themselves in power in this advanced Age of Gloom—which they cannot.
The reason why they cannot is not that there exist electric trains and electric irons, radios and television sets, aeroplanes and washing machines and “electronic brains” and all manner of major and minor commodities, products of technical skill, but that the overwhelming majority of mankind in this Age—the more and more numerous and duller and duller herd of all races, in process of general bastardisation—is against any and every aristocratic wisdom. The reason is that the millions and millions—soon milliards—of sub-men feel themselves threatened in their dream of pig-like “happiness,” nay, in their no less pig-like existence, by whoever embodies such a wisdom “against Time.” The reason is that the increasingly powerful agents of the death-forces, natural leaders of this Age, use radio, cinema, television, and all technical means that money can secure, to excite the unthinking herd against the Best, while doing everything they can, through the advertisement of more and more wonderful commodities, to keep the average man’s slumbering mind away from higher things—away from every aspiration “against Time”; away from every aggressive criticism of the fundamental Dark Age dogmas and, in general, away from all impersonal problems . . . until its slumber ends in the definitive sleep of death.
It is not—surely not!—technical progress as such which so deeply shocks Kalki’s future compagnons at arms (or the fathers of such ones), those natural aristocrats of the youngest human race, whom I have described as “the Best.” It is the glaring disparity between the perfection of modern technical achievements considered as “means” and the worthlessness of the ends to the service of which they are put; it is the contrast between that wonderful Aryan intelligence, which stands and shines behind practically every discovery of modern science, every invention of modern technique, and the steadily increasing degeneracy of the sub-human multitudes who enjoy the products of its creative ingenuity in daily life, as a matter of course, nay, who, through their misuse of them, are sinking lower and lower into that brainless and soulless “happiness”—I repeat: that pig-like “happiness”—which is the ideal of our times.
That ideal is the one forwarded, under one form or another, more and more unmistakably in the course of centuries, by all typical Dark Age leaders “in Time,” in particular, by that most efficient of all agents of the Dark Powers during the last 2,400 (at least) and especially during the last three or four hundred years: the international Jew.
Notes
1. I have mentioned in this book Hans Grimm’s tragic warning. (See his book Warum? Woher? aber Wohin?, pp. 107–108 and 206 and following.)
2. Billions (short scale)—Ed.
3. Destruction of forests, for instance.
