User talk:WHEELER/Nikos Kazantzakis and the Swastika

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(Foreword: One must read "Glories to the Spartans" first {it is further down on the list}, or you wouldn't understand one of the conclusions. This is also in answer to questions on the Talk:Classical definition of republic that someone doesn't know the dangers between mixing Western with Eastern mentalities. Nikos Kazantzakis is a representative of many people of that period.)

What is the Swastika? The Swastika is a Near East symbol of the cycle of life, the symbol of the never-ending grind and hopelessness of life. The swastika has taken many forms and has become more stylized as it progressed through history. It is a symbol of the East.

The most stylistic form can be seen on the banners and symbols of Adolph Hitler’s NAZI Germany. How did Adolph Hitler become acquainted with this Near East symbol?

It is surmised that an abbot of a Catholic Austrian monastery took a trip to India and brought a swastika back to hang in the monastery church whereby a young Adolph was introduced to the symbol and probably other Eastern thought and philosophies.

From there, it ended up as a symbol for the Third Reich. It is an appropriate symbol for all of Socialism. For socialism, although developed in Western Culture, is an Eastern mode of thought and modality.

Who is Nikos Kazantzakis? The proverb says, “You know a man by the friends he keeps”. Who are the friends of Nikos Kazantzakis?

“If he were forced to designate those who had ‘left their traces embedded most deeply in my soul’…he would name Homer, Buddha, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Zorba.” (1)

Who is Nietzsche? Nietzsche is one of the philosophical forerunners of National Socialism. Nietzsche posited “God is dead”. He is the foundation of the philosophy of Nihilism. It is the “superman” of Nietzsche that the SS is based on. Part of the formation of the SS was the imprinting of animalistic characteristics in men. Kazantzakis also anthropologizes the weather and inanimate objects in his books. Nietzsche’s philosophy of Nihilism is the perfect counterpart to the scientific materialism of Marxist socialism. Hitler called his movement “the fulfillment of Marxist doctrine”. (2)

“Kazantzakis wrote several articles on Nietzsche for the Athenian newspaper Neon Asti between l907 and l909, the precise period in which he studied under Bergson; a more important later article, commemorating the anniversary of Nietzsche’s death, appeared in Eleftheros Typos on August 22 and 26, l926.” (3)

Where did Nietzsche get his inspiration from? His major defining work is Zarathustra. “It is built around the semihistorical, semimythic Zoroaster, the Christlike founder of a religion whose very core is duality.” (4) Zoroastrianism is the old Persian religion.

Nietzschean philosophy can be found throughout Kazantzakis. For instance: “God, like man, is a process in being”. {If God is in process of change then Aristotle would say, then that being can not be God; it is imperfect. God is a perfect being; the prime mover; that which causes change but does not change. Kazantzakis has slipped back into pre-socratic philosophy saying that “all is change” which Plato and Aristotle refute convincingly.}

Second, Kimon Friar writes that Kazantzakis is “creating (that) evolutionary surge that is ceaselessly striving to purify material into spirit.” (5) Material doesn’t become spirit. Matter doesn’t have the “potentiality” to become spirit. This abrogates the philosophical maxim that “like produces like”. This is so Oriental in thought. Anything with the words “evolutionary” is Marxist thought and philosophy.

Not only does Nietzsche claim that God is dead in Zarathustra but also man must become God himself. It is about destroying the old and bringing in the new. (6)

Another Nietzschean form that Kazantakis utilizes is this idea of destruction.

“But this new Old Testament deity can be defeated. And so men must band together out of mutual love and responsibility and sacrifice in order to fight God’s fight in order to destroy and purify the old world by fire and to establish the new world that may arise from its ashes.” Quoting Kazantakis, “Set fire! This is our great duty today amid such immoral and hopeless chaos…Sow fire to purify the earth! (7)

This same expression is used in the book, The Greek Passion. “My apostles, scatter and burn the earth to its root; do not pity it, my brothers…” (8)

Goebbels, mirroring Katzanzakis, spoke that Naziism had another, more obvious and direct, function. In his radio broadcasts in the last days, he said:

"The bomb-terror spares the dwellings of neither rich nor poor; before the labor offices of total war the last class barriers have had to go down...Together with the monuments of culture there crumble also the last obstacles to the fulfillment of our revolutionary task. Now that everything is in ruins, we are forced to rebuild Europe. In the past, private possessions tied us to a bourgeois restraint. Now the bombs, instead of killing all Europeans, have only smashed the prison walls that kept them captive...In trying to destroy Europe's future, the enemy has only succeeded in smashing its past; and with that, everything old and outworn has gone." (21)

The other main influence on Kazantzakis was Henri Bergson (1859-l941) who was a French philosopher of evolution and was of Anglo-Polish parentage. He posited an “élan vital” a feeling of creativity which is the force behind reality. There really is no God in this philosophy either. Mysticism is very predominant in this philosophy. Furthermore, Mr. Bergson deconstructed “closed” societies that stifled the human spirit and advocated “open” societies guided by mysticism that let man do whatever they wanted.

The next big influence on Kazantzakis was the East. “Kazantzakis was well versed in most Occidental and Oriental philosophies and religions.” (9)

“The true Buddha has no body,” Kazantzakis once wrote, and Pandhelis Prevelakis adds, speaking of his own friend and master, “Beneath the poet, the mystagogue was buried…Buddhist renunciation filtered through Kazantzakis like an unfulfilled presentiment,…” (10)

“Kazantzakis’ library indicates his scholarly concern for ethics and especially for Eastern mysticism.” (11)

In talking about “The Saviors of God”, Kazantzakis has his readers go through steps and the first step is “The Preparation”: “to see boundaries, to reject boundaries, to become free of all hope as well as all fear.” (12) This statement is totally Buddhist and has nothing similar to Greek thought. This statement is exactly opposite of Greek thought. Socrates is the founder of Western culture and a reviewer of Kazantzakis “relates how Kazantzakis’ view that man must “extricate himself from both hope and fear, the two great millstones which grind Socratic man.” (13)

“Crete for me,” he once wrote, “is the synthesis which I always pursue, the synthesis of Greece and the Orient. I neither feel Europe in me nor a clear and distilled classical Greece; nor do I at all fell the anarchic chaos and the will-less perseverance of the Orient. I feel something else, a synthesis,…” (14)

This synthesis would have been achieved by Darius or Xerxes if they had succeeded. Isn’t this what Alexander the Great wanted to do; meld the Persian Greek cultures together? Syncretism is Eastern Oriental thought. This is totally opposed to the masculine “define-divide” modality of Ancient Greece.

Not only was Kazantzakis tied to the East through Nietzsche and Buddhism but:

“In The Fratricides Kazantzakis seems to wish to repay some of his accumulated debt to the Jews, an obligation perhaps more moral and metaphorical than it was literal. “This man enamored of Judaism”, his widow has called him (Helen Kazantzakis, p. 88). In both Report to Greco and in his letters, he attributes a major part of his education into the modern world–particularly his political education—to the young Jewish women of Polish and Russian descent with whom he became intimate soon after his arrival in Berlin: he immortalizes them as Rahel in Toda Raba, as Rala in The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, as Noemi in Freedom or Death. Kazantzakis took vicarious pride in the fact that El Greco chose to live in the Jewish quarter of Toledo (Helen Kazantzakis, p. 146), and he himself often claimed to be partly Jewish. As he wrote years afterward to on of his Berlin friends, “There’s a very large drop of Hebrew blood in my veins and this drop produces an effervescence and commotion in all my Hellenic and Cretan blood. I am obsessed and possessed by the Hebraic destiny.” (15) It is no wonder that he married a Russian Jew.

Morton P. Levitt, author of “The Cretan Glance”, is constantly praising Kazantzakis as producing “fine” modernist literature. Mr. Levitt praises Kazantzakis as a “Modernist master”. (16) He uses this term three times in his preface. The term is used liberally throughout the book. The term “Modernist” is a code word for Marxist-Leninism. Modernism like in the term Modern architecture, Modern Poetry, Modern literature all connotate Jewish-Marxist influence and modality.

Nikos Kazantzakis first visited Russia in l925, when Stalin had seized control from Trotsky. Kazantzakis visited a country that destroyed the Orthodox faith and killed 90% of the Orthodox clergy. (Hitler was influenced by Lenin’s use of concentration camps.) He married a Russian Jew. He composed a terza rima cantos to Lenin and Nietzsche whom he considered “great men” who were “Companions of the Odyssey”. (17) The biggest carriers and promoters of socialism are the Jews. The Jews are an Eastern people with eastern mindsets. It was Jewish influence and action that undermined both Orthodox Russia and Christian Germany.

“Marxism for him is not a cause of Cretan revolution, but a manifestation of it; he has found in this seemingly alien theology not an excuse for dreaming of freedom, but an intellectualized, Western version of this ancient Cretan dream.” (18)

Most of the major characters of Kazantzakis are small autobiographies of himself. These characters of his modernistic fiction are speaking Nietzchean philosophy not Western philosophy. These characters of his speak Buddhist philosophy not Ancient Greek philosophy. His characters spout Marxist-Lenninist values and viewpoints not historically sound Cretan or Hellenistic thought. Cretans and Greeks are turning to Nikos Kazantzakis for guidance????? Is Kazantzakis the paradigm of Greek thought. No, he isn’t. His characters espouse the philosophy of Nihilism. All of Kazantzakis later’s works are a synthesis of Bergson and Nietzsche and Nietzsche is carrier of Zoroastrianism. “The eclectic Kazantzakis utilizes Bergson much as he does Nietzsche, selecting those images and ideas that inform and reinforce his own perceptions of life.” He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Western thought is purely Western thought. Western Thought just like in logic, if mixed with Eastern thought becomes Eastern thought. Western thought only exists in the purity that it is Western. Eastern thought corrupts and destroys Western thought. There can be no synthesis between Western and Eastern thought. Just like there can be no synthesis between good and evil. It goes back to the principle of Paramenides of non-contradiction; a subject can not have two predicates that are opposites. This is one of the foundational structures of Western thought. Kazantzakis destroys this foundational structure of Paramenides.

Nikos Kazantzakis is a disturbed man who is mixed up, much like Adolph Hitler was, in Eastern Religion and Mysticism. The man was brutalized during the Turkish occupation that seriously affected this man’s mind. To think that Lenin, who detested aristocracy and destroyed one, is a Companion to Homer who extolled the virtue of Greek Aristocratic culture is absolutely ludicrious; the two have nothing in common. Kazantzakis misses the whole point of Homer. The man is hopelessly deceived. Socrates said that a philosopher cannot be deceived. Truth can not contradict truth. Nikos Kazantzakis is no philosopher but a man caught up in the smoke filled bars and tavernas of Europe and in the sophisms of Jewish women.

Nikos Kazantzakis is a Xerxes in literary clothing. In order for man to be free according to him, Western culture has to be destroyed. Kazantzakis realizes that, at the least, “we must continue to fight the Blacks of this world”; blacks meaning the Christians, Monarchists, the Socrateses (plural) and Ciceroes of this world. (19) What Nikos Kazantzakis has done was complete the work the Darius, Xerxes and Alexander failed to complete. He is supplanting Western culture and thought with a bizarre Eastern mentality and syncretism.

Nothing can further point out this truth when he puts these words in the nephew of Captain Mihalis, Kosmas in “Freedom or Death.” “There’s no hope. Long live Crete!” (p 432) This is Nihilism at its finest. Compare this too the expression of the Spartan King Leonidas at Thermopylae knowing that he is going to die: “Have a good breakfast, men, for we dine in Hades.” Nothing is so foreign to Greek Hellenistic thought than what Kazantzakis puts in the mouth of Kosmas. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle all expounded the afterlife. They knew that the “good” are rewarded. Their logic from nature dictated so. Socrates says in the Apology, “If on arrival in the other world…” (20) The Dorians and the Ionians both had belief in the “other” world. Kazantzakis nihilism is antithetical to anything Hellenic.

A True Doric Warrior would have nothing to do with him. A True Doric Warrior would burn his books, disinter Kazantzakis from Doric Land and throw his body into Salamis Bay so he can be with his fellow brothers, the Persians. Nikos Kazantzakis is a literary Ephialtes. He is bringing the Persians with their Zoroastrian religion thru the back door.

The Swastika takes on many forms. The one form it did take in the 20th century was under the most vicious regimes ever imagined. Anywhere where Eastern philosophy and mysticism reared its head, in Russia and Germany, scores of people have died. The Swastika is Eastern philosophical metaphor for the Marxist Nihilist ideology of “We destroy in order to create” And if this creation doesn’t come up to standard the process is repeated just like the Kyklos of which the Swastika represents. It is a correlation to the “Marxist view of the regeneration of man through revolution.” It is not a coincidence then when James F. Lea on his book, “Kazantzakis, the Politics of Salvation” has a Swastika on its front cover.

Point, Set, Match.

[edit] Miscellania

• ""Mr. Herbert Read (quite some time before he was knighted, to be sure) praised destruction in a book appropriately called To Hell with Culture (No. 4. of the series, "The Democratic Order") in which he spoke about the necessity of destroying all "non-democratic, aristocratic or capitalist" cultures. "To hell with such culture! Read wrote, "To the rubbish-heap and furnace with it all! Let us celebrate the democratic revolution with the biggest holocaust in the history of the world. When Hilter has finished bombing our cities, let the demolition squads complete the good work. Then let us go out into the wide open spaces and build anew.""

This was written in 1941 when the barbarians dominated everywhere. Still, Sir Herbert had the courage to write in 1943, "Communism is an extreme form of democracy, and it is totalitarian: but equally the totalitarian state in the form of fascism is an extreme form of democracy. All forms of socialism, whether state socialism of the Russian kind, or national socialism of the German kind, or democratic socialism of the British kind, are professedly democratic, that is to say, they all obtain popular assent by the manipulation of mass psychology." He then went on to explain why the Third Reich was much more thoroughly democratic than either Britain or the United States." (Leftism Revisited, pg 159)

[edit] References

(1) The Cretan Glance, The World and Art of Nikos Kazantzakis, by Morton P. Levitt, Ohio State University Press, Columbus, OH, l980. Pg 88.

(2) Liberty or Equality or Leftism Revisited, by Kurt von Kuenhelt-Ledihn. Forgive me, my books are in storage and I don’t have the complete reference.

(3) The Cretan Glance, Pg 108

(4) The Cretan Glance, 94

(5) The Cretan Glance, pg 12

(6) The Cretan Glance, pg 94

(7) The Cretan Glance pg 13 quoting from the Saviors of the Gods pp 113, 115

(8) The Cretan Glance, pg 49.

(9) Kazantzakis: The Politics of Salvation, James F. Lea, foreword by Helen Kazantzakis, University of Alabama Press, University, Alabama, l979. pg 142.

(10) The Cretan Glance, pg 99

(11) The Cretan Glance, Pg 109

(12) The Cretan Glance, pg 12

(13) Kazantzakis, pg 145

(14) The Cretan Glance, Pg 4

(15) The Cretan Glance, Pg 174. It is the 16th footnote to the eighth chapter. It continues though: “The obsession evidently went back a long time; he tells in this same letter of convincing his father when he was just ten t let him take Hebrew lessons from the Rabbi of Chania. But his relatives protested, and the lessons soon ceased. (Letter to Leah Dunkelblum, Antibes, March 23, 1951, cited in Helen Kazantzakis, pp 495-96.) The claim about his ancestry is obviously metaphorical (ecumenically, he also contended at times that he had Arabic blood), an attempt perhaps to create within himself a symbolic union of the disparate Arnoldian forces of Hebraism and Hellenism. In the wider sense, it seems to be related to Jorge Luis Borges’ equally metaphorical claim to be partly Jewish—an acknowledgement of sorts of the heightened significance of the Jew as metaphor in the literature of the Modernist era, as a sign of moral stability (however he may wander and suffer, even because he must wander and suffer in an increasingly unstable world.”

(16) The Cretan Glance, xii

(17) The Cretan Glance, pg 15.

(18) The Cretan Glance, pg 29.

(19) The Cretan Glance, pg 164.

(20) Apology sec 41.

(21) Quoted in H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, New York, The MacMillan Co., 1947. pp 50-51 as quoted in Fr. Seraphim Rose Nihilism, The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, pg 77.