IT’S COME TO THIS: Namaste, fascists! The racist history of yoga.
[Stewart Home, the author of Fascist Yoga] pursues his promise of fascist yoga to the Free State of Fiume in 1920. After the First World War, Fiume (today the Croatian city of Rijeka) was seized by a one-eyed, cocaine-snorting sex-addict novelist and former soldier called Gabriele D’Annunzio. He established a regime with all the symbols and violence of fascism, if not the complete ideology. There were balcony addresses and Roman salutes and the troops guarding D’Annunzio used the bellicose slogan “I don’t give a damn”, which was later co-opted by Benito Mussolini. Those around D’Annunzio in Fiume formed a group called YOGA, Home says. They were mystics and nudists who danced and hugged trees and believed in a spiritual hierarchy based on the Hindu caste system. The group emblazoned its shortlived weekly paper with swastikas — they believed the swastika to be a symbol of their Aryan ancestors after it was discovered scrawled on ancient artefacts. The Nazis used it for the same reason.
Like YOGA, the Nazis also twisted Hinduism. They tried to use it to justify the Holocaust. Home shows how Heinrich Himmler, the chief planner of the Final Solution, was influenced by a German Indologist called Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who was enchanted by Hinduism. Hauer founded the German Faith Movement, which sought to promote a new religion, a fusion of paganism and Nazi ideas. When writing in 1934 about the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu text, Hauer said it called on men to meet the hereditary or “innate duty” demanded of them by their caste and fate, even if that deed is steeped in guilt. Himmler believed that his caste — the SS — were called upon by fate to exterminate Jews.
The weakness of Home’s book is there is no clean link between yoga and fascism. There is no record of Mussolini or Hitler ever doing a downward dog. This mostly doesn’t matter because so much of the history is strange and interesting, but sometimes Home stretches his thesis too far. A few pages are wasted trying to prove that Ezra Pound’s fascism was “very much entwined” with yoga. As evidence, Home relies on a sign that Pound once put in the window of a bookshop he owned that said something or other about marijuana and communism — it’s thin and convoluted evidence.
Still though, considering yoga’s been practiced by Nazis, Italian Fascists, Aleister Crowley, and more recently, guys wearing man buns, why take chances?