Nate Cull (.social)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.
(Like some of the Nazis were also AGAINST Tibetan Buddhism for the same reason others were for it - they saw it as some kind of power center, but maybe they just got all that from Theosophy - the D&D / Lord of the Rings fanfic of its era, only taken seriously -which had a huge, badly confused, Tibet fixation as MYSTEERIOUS LAND O' MYSTERY!!!and secret headquarters of all the WORLD CONSPIRACIES that weren't run by 1. Jews, 2. Masons or 3. Catholics)
"However, since the 1990s new trends have begun to emerge. These trends emerge from the right-wing neo-Nazi sector. On the one hand Neo-Nazi apologists employ the conspiracy myths about the Tibetans as supposed friends of the Nazis in order to exculpate Hitler and the Nazi regime and portray part of the National Socialist ruling elite as innocently ensnared victims, while on the other hand assimilating the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama as their comrades in National Socialism..."
".. Another trend has originated from German authors, in whose books the idealized image of Tibet is being turned into its dark, but equally distorted, mirror image. Here the alleged connections to National Socialism and neo-Fascism are linked to a literal interpretation of the final victory of the armies of Shambhala, with Tibetan Tantric Buddhism being seen as a tool for world dominance by the Tibetans...
".. 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.
neville park@natecull S-s-sorry, what??
My neighbourhood is the biggest Tibetan enclave in the country, possibly the continent, and I can assure you the only thing the Buddhist monks are conspiring about is taking all the seats at the Tim Horton's (damn them [that's a joke])
@nev Right. The mystical "Tibet" of Helena Blavatsky and Anne Bailey's Theosophical Society has almost nothing to do with the real, actually-existing Tibet.
But the TS was *mega huge* in the West in the 19th and early 20th centuries and literally did want to unite all the world's religions under some form of (badly Westernised) Tibetan Buddhism, so there's that.
Poor Tibet got used as a plot coupon by SO MANY pulp-noir stories that boiled over into actual 20th C politics.
@nev The funny part is Buddhism only came to Tibet around 1,000 years ago. From both China and India.
Far from being the super-ancient faith Blavatsky imagined it as, Tibetan Buddhism is younger than Christianity.