The life of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the English aristocrat who helped build Nazi antisemitism, is a fascinating / terrifying glimpse into how cultlike ideologies can form
The life of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the English aristocrat who helped build Nazi antisemitism, is a fascinating / terrifying glimpse into how cultlike ideologies can form
Also the Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organisation), a German group of White Russians (ie: anti-Communist, not racially white supremacists, though they were also that) who influenced Nazi doctrine
Some very uncomfortable parallels there with both Ayn Rand and the post-1989 Russian oligarchs backing Trump.
Russian anti-Communism manifesting as international fascism has not gone away.
Some of this found via
https://info-buddhism.com/Nazis-of-Tibet-A-Twentieth-Century-Myth_Engelhardt.html
which is an interesting deconstruction of the 'Nazism backed by Tibetan Supergurus' myth, which also has not gone away - tldr, there was no actual Nazi-Tibet link BUT many influential Nazis and proto-Nazis (see eg Houston Stewart Chamberlain) were SUPER INTO the idea of ancient Aryan Supermen from India and Tibet - as were many Western Theosophical groups - so some of them WANTED to believe in Indian/Tibetan supergurus.
Hence the swastika.
This, sadly, isn't just weird Indiana Jones history, because if you search for 'shambala' you will find a bunch if weird (and very active) organised alt-right groups smelling strongly of Nazism who are ALSO super into Tibetan Buddhism (and 'moral/cultural decay of the West') for some reason
So don't think the past has necessarily gone away. Some of it's coming back for another go.
".. And this wave has already spilled over to fundamentalist evangelical groups in the United States, which are now conjuring up images of an impending Tibeto-Buddhist global conspiracy."
Yes. This began in the 1980s. I know because I read some of those "anti-New Age" US (and Australian) Evangelical books then. They had a particular fear of both Theosophy and Tibet, which makes most sense if one looks at Rene Geunon's Traditionalism as a possible source.
The Evangelicals have a big megaphone.
Some examples of highly influential books in this vein:
* Hannah Newman's "The Rainbow Swastika", currently splattered all over the net, though I can't seem to find the original - sometime mid 1980s I think
* Constance Cumbey's "The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow" (1983)
When you see Evangelicals calling liberals "Nazis", the source of their deep fears may be from one these books, and it might be worth reading to get a sense of what it is they fear and why