Avatar e Nazismo (2)
karamazov
alcuni riferimenti storici e bibliografici:
About avatars: Caveat emptor!Dec. 30, 2009
HAROLD BRACKMAN , THE JERUSALEM POST
Even before the buzz began building for James Cameron's sci fi blockbuster Avatar,
today's "millennial generation," the film's biggest fans, knew what the word
meant. Few knew the classical definition of "avatar" as "the incarnation of a
Hindu diety" that people my age learned in the 1960s taking comparative religion
courses or reading Hermann Hesse. To current-day collegians, the word is the
self-definition of a hi-tech kid who manipulates an image of himself projected in
a computer game.
Commentators on Cameron's special effects tour-de-force are virtually all
enthralled by the 3-D visual pyrotechnics, but are deeply divided along
ideological lines. The environment-friendly Left embraces Avatar as a love poem to
(extraterrestrial) nature's wonders and a cautionary tale about what will become
of our planet and species if we don't reform posthaste.
Enviro-skeptics on the Right deride the film as a misanthropic revenge fantasy in
which the soulful planet Pandora and its race of blue, 10-foot-tall noble
savages - the Navi - all but annihilate humanity's advance guard, portrayed as a
rapacious, futuristic military-industrial complex.
Ultimately in Cameron's film, the only good humans are dead - or rather,
resurrected as "good Navi" by projection of their astral selves into alien bodies.
They are the "avatars" who have "gone native" -first by taking on an alien
persona, then by totally identifying with the Navi even if that means the end of
the human project back on Earth.
WHAT UNSETTLED me was not Cameron's Romantic primitivism - which, after all, goes
back at least as far as Rousseau - but the uncanny resonances of Avatar with a
recurrent theme in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric
Nazism and the Politics of Identity (NYU Press, 2002). A fascinating excavation of
the extreme Right's post-World War II literary underworld, this book explores a
subject much less well-known than the prewar nexus between the Nazis and the
occult.
Goodrick-Clarke catalogues fantastic tales - extraterrestrial Atlanteans who
burrowed under Tibet to escape Noah's flood, only to reemerge now as potential
architects of a Fourth Reich; and SS "miracle weapons" (including "W-7" flying
saucers) based in Antarctica, where the Fuhrer and Eva Braun are said to have
taken refuge - but he also analyzes how, in the post-World War II era, myths of
Aryan racial superiority found a home in the world of New Age spirituality and
environmental consciousness.
The story starts with Savitri Devi (born Maximiani Portas in Lyons), the
self-styled priestess of the new Aryan religion, who spent the prewar and wartime
years in India seeking a Nordic-Hindu symbiosis and communing with anti-British
ultranationalists who shared her notion of Hitler as "an incarnation of Vishnu."
In 1945, she returned to Europe to become the jailed heroine of the new Neo-Nazi
underground.
Her devotee Claudio Mutti, a supporter of the Italian neo-fascist movement (MSI)
responsible for the terrorist campaign culminating in the 1980 Bologna railway
station bombing that killed 85, lauded Muslims for honoring Hitler as a haj at the
same time as Hindu extremists saw him as a positive manifestation of Vishnu.
Devi's widely translated manifesto, The Lightning and the Sun (1958), begins with
Aryan man's reincarnation in "the late-born child of light" in Braunau am Inn,
Austria, in 1889. A millennial redeemer, the late-born Hitler is her "Kalki
avatar."
IN THE 1960s, Devi (who died in 1982) became a pen pal of Britain's young fascists
and met American George Lincoln Rockwell. For her doctrines of Hitler as a divine
leader, she was venerated by the next generation of American Neo-Nazi and
Christian identity leaders.
Roughly at the same time that youthful hippie "flower power" was blossoming,
Wilhelm Landig's German trilogy of Thule novels counterbalanced fears of Europe's
racial mongrelization with hope for a resurgent Aryan "Age of Aquarius." Then,
after the Arab and Iranian oil embargoes and the energy crisis, neo-Nazism took on
an environmentally friendly hue in D. H. Haarman's three-volume Geheime
Wonderwaffen ("Secret Miracle Weapons"), which claimed that SS inventors of
electromagnetic flying saucers had also achieved an antigravitational power source
that would now be an alternative to fossil fuels were it not for a Jewish
conspiracy of banks, oil companies and car makers.
Eventually, Holocaust Denier Ernst Zundel and others used the Internet to market a
multimedia m�lange of extremist books and music with a New Age flavor featuring
time travel, extraterrestrial visitations and fantasies of Nazi revenge and
rebirth.
By the late 1990s, fascists on both sides of the Atlantic were brandishing their
"green" credentials. The charge made by Louis Farrakhan's followers that
"Zionists" were responsible "for the hole in the ozone layer" did not come out of
nowhere.
YET WHAT could seem further apart than Hitler the Aryan white supremacist and
Cameron's hero, Jake, who loves the wronged Navi enough to be reborn as one?
Unfortunately, youthful members of the rightist underground who avidly read
reprints of Devi's deification of the Fuhrer don't look at Hitler with Cameron's
loathing - and they may view Avatar as quite compatible with their own extremist
faith.
There may not be many such young people today - but there weren't that many more
such young people in Europe a century ago, when Mussolini reinterpreted Italian
Futurism as a call for fascist revolution and German rightists began experimenting
with melding racism and occultist religiosity with ultimately horrific
consequences. In the minds of some of today's young extremists, an al-Qaida
meditation on the 72 virgins to be had in paradise, and an Odinist vision of a
new, antimodern Valhalla to be created on earth are both appealing.
Is it really wise for us to dismiss so confidently the ominous possibility that
today's marginal ideologies of hate, rendered palatable for mainstream consumption
by hi-tech media evocations of pristine new worlds, may yet be empowered by the
21st century? Just think of what a future Leni Riefenstahl - combining Cameron's
imaginative tools with Devi's atavistic vision of apocalypse - might accomplish by
unleashing her own Avatar.
The writer, an historian with a PhD from UCLA for a dissertation on the history of
Black-Jewish relations, lives in San Diego.
n3tgan3sh
> Is it really wise for us to dismiss so confidently the ominous possibility that
> today's marginal ideologies of hate, rendered palatable for mainstream consumption
> by hi-tech media evocations of pristine new worlds, may yet be empowered by the
> 21st century? Just think of what a future Leni Riefenstahl - combining Cameron's
> imaginative tools with Devi's atavistic vision of apocalypse - might accomplish by
> unleashing her own Avatar.
un coacervo di riferimenti confusi, ampiamente conosciuti e trattati,
che non ha nulla in comune con Avatar di Cameron.
Al netto, poi, di cazzate assurde quali tirar in causa
quell'islamofascio di Mutti.
Dagliela su, sempri Maurizio Blondet quando parla dell'oscura lobby
ebraica.
karamazov
"n3tgan3sh" <n3tg...@email.it> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:c9735132-0977-420a...@c29g2000yqd.googlegroups.com...
> On 3 Feb, 17:55, "karamazov" <k...@virgilio.it> wrote:
>
>> Is it really wise for us to dismiss so confidently the ominous possibility that
>> today's marginal ideologies of hate, rendered palatable for mainstream
>> consumption
>> by hi-tech media evocations of pristine new worlds, may yet be empowered by the
>> 21st century? Just think of what a future Leni Riefenstahl - combining
>> Cameron's
>> imaginative tools with Devi's atavistic vision of apocalypse - might accomplish
>> by
>> unleashing her own Avatar.
>
> un coacervo di riferimenti confusi
dove vedi la confusione?
, ampiamente conosciuti e trattati,
> che non ha nulla in comune con Avatar di Cameron.
l'antimodernismo, l'esoterismo (il titolo stesso del film mi sembra abbastanza
eloquente)
l'ecologismo, mi pare che i punti in comune siano diversi e ben argomentati.
> Al netto, poi, di cazzate assurde quali tirar in causa
> quell'islamofascio di Mutti.
� citato tra gli esempi della diffusione delle idee della Devi, idee che come
saprai
hanno un discreto seguito tutt'oggi anche da noi
> Dagliela su, sempri Maurizio Blondet quando parla dell'oscura lobby
> ebraica.
l'oscura lobby ebraica parlerebbe apertamente di film nazista, basti pensare
che il protagonista, uno straniero, guida il suo popolo di adozione contro
l'aggressione
dei capitalisti venuti dal nuovo mondo. mancano giusto i baffetti.
no il discorso � pi� sottile, non a caso Brackman distingue nettamente
Cameron da una propagandista esplicita come Leni Riefenstahl.
giglio robbo' d'acciaio
> l'antimodernismo
"antimodernismo" è uno dei concetti più stupidi mai concepiti, è il
complesso di Peter Pan applicato ad una società.