JFC Fuller's Army

But there's no danger
It's a professional career - Elvis Costello

Just a quick note about how they're the damnedest things, the things I didn't know.

Since I was fourteen or so I've had on my bookshelf a copy of JFC Fuller's Decisive Battles of the Western World. I knew he was a Major General, an early advocate of air power and mechanized assault, and a popular military historian. I'd known his philosophy of armoured warfare won more favour in Germany than in Britain, and that it became the blitzkrieg of commanders such as Heinz Guderian. And that was about it. What I didn't know was Fuller was both a fascist and an occultist, and no slouch at either.

Fuller served on the Policy Directorate of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, and was the only Englishman honoured with an invitation to Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday party in 1939. He was also a life-long Thelemite and an early advocate of Aleister Crowley. A .pdf of Fuller's early study of Crowley, The Star in the West, can be read online here, and also his Secret Wisdom of the Qabalah. (By the way, an online edition of his Foundation of the Science of War is hosted by the US Army Command and General Staff.) He was also an accomplished artist of occult subjects. That's his work, entitled "Knowledge and Conversation," next to his portrait in the above illustration. Kenneth Grant, in Outer Gateways, states that Fuller actually drew the sigils for Liber XII, "one of the most mysterious communications every received by Crowley" under alleged inspiration of the entity Aiwass.

Grant adds that Fuller's sigils are evocative of those reproduced by purported UFO contactee George Adamski, who insisted that they were "not to be interpreted mystically, but as glyphs of the nut-and-bolt variety." (In the 1950s Adamski asserted he had been contacted by "spacemen" from Venus, much as the occupants of the airship of 1897 claimed to have been out-of-state rather than off-world. Now, the claims of origin are most often distant stars. The lies, whether human or trans-human, keep abreast of science's plausible denial.)

Grant writes:

It is well known that Hitler had occult affiliations, and that one of his chief engineers was the celebrated Werner von Braun who later enabled the Americans to visit the moon. Is it not feasible that Hitler, in favouring Fuller as he did, was not only interested in Fuller's tank designs but also in his other, more recherche machines? The fact should not be overlooked that Hitler was in contact with entities as enigmatic and as alarming as Aiwass, and perhaps his interpretations of the messages he received from them were as coloured by his conditioning as were those of Crowley.

So, what's the point? Two points: if we mean to combat fascism, then we should learn to recognize it on our bookshelves and in the mindbombs dropped by respectable fascists. (Fuller's Generalship of Ulysses S Grant is still an influential study of the Civil War strategist, though one Amazon reviewer does chide his history of The Second World War for barely mentioning the extermination of millions of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs.) Also, we had also better brush up on our occultism. Because we can't really know the fascist character if we project upon it our familiar secular and liberal mental landscapes. That is going to take us to mad places, but that's the nature of comprehending the method.