{"id":29681,"date":"2025-09-18T13:36:18","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T13:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/29681\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T13:36:18","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T13:36:18","slug":"fascist-yoga-the-nazi-pose-how-modern-yoga-is-linked-to-the-far-right-eps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/29681\/","title":{"rendered":"Fascist Yoga: The Nazi pose: How modern yoga is linked to the far right | EPS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stewart Home, 63, is a legend of British counterculture: a director, writer, playwright, and activist, famous for his pulp novels that reflected 1970s London<\/a> \u2014 populated by hooligans, skinheads, and hustlers \u2014 and for being someone who speaks bluntly about any subject he considers worth dissecting. <\/p>\n

His latest work is a book whose title leaves no room for ambiguity: Fascist Yoga (Pluto Press). \u201cOriginally, the book was called Fascist Yogis and New Age Frauds: Physical Culture with a Fakir Twist. However, the consensus among Pluto\u2019s sales and publishing team was that we needed the words fascist and yoga in the main title to make sure potential readers understood what the book was about,\u201d says Home, whose most celebrated work is perhaps Tainted Love, in which he narrates 1960s London through the diaries left behind by his mother, a sex worker and drug addict.<\/p>\n

In Fascist Yoga, the author reviews the origins of yoga\u2019s introduction to the West up to the present day. He does so with the eye of a skeptic who has heard the same story far too many times. <\/p>\n

\u201cModern Western yoga is 19th-century European gymnastics with a sprinkling of orientalist fairy dust,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s about 120 years old and very different from the meditative yoga practiced in ancient India, although some people like to confuse the two. I\u2019m not the only one who argues that modern yoga has its roots in European gymnastics; there\u2019s academic discourse and a good number of books and articles on the subject.\u201d <\/p>\n

Home continues: \u201cI already knew a bit about fascist ideologies and fascist countercultures, so it didn\u2019t seem strange to me. I was aware of fascists interested in tarot and other forms of spirituality and religion, from paganism to mainstream branches of Christianity, including the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and especially their more traditionalist factions. So I did some research, and I was surprised to find not only that there were more fascist yogis and white supremacists, but that some of them had played a key role in spreading modern yoga<\/a> during the first half of the 20th century.\u201d<\/p>\n

The writer attended his first yoga class in 2009 and even then noticed something was off: \u201cI was horrified by the instructor talking about chakras and other New Age nonsense while teaching the class,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n

\"StewartHome, pictured in Barbican, London, upside down.Manuel V\u00e1zquez<\/p>\n

In the book, Home delves into the nooks and crannies of yoga\u2019s history: from the curious reinvention of the movement in early 20th-century California, through the Nazis, and up to the mouthpieces of the American alt-right<\/a>, tracing a straight line that leads to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.<\/a>, current Secretary of Health in Trump\u2019s government, and his court of anti-vaxxers who, in the name of wellness, are dismantling the U.S. healthcare system. <\/p>\n

In Fascist Yoga one stumbles upon characters as delirious as the Frenchwoman Maximiani Julia Portas, better known as Savitri Devi, who believed Hitler was an incarnation of a Hindu god and mixed paganism, ecology, and occultism. Readers also discover the ghosts that emerged from the intersection of Western mythology and Hindu nationalism in Modi\u2019s India \u2014 in a spiral that pushes one to wonder how on earth something as seemingly harmless as the practice of yoga has served as a breeding ground for some of the most extreme ideologies.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, the book has angered many, amused quite a few others, and enlightened some. \u201cSome yoga enthusiasts have gotten very upset and write or speak about the book as if the title were Yoga Is Fascist instead of Fascist Yoga, with a subtitle that makes it clear there are also other currents in yoga,” says Home. \u201cOf course, I\u2019m not saying that all yoga is fascist or that all yogis are fascists, but there are yoga fans who want to pretend that\u2019s what I\u2019m saying so they can dismiss me and protect their subculture from any critical approach. In fact, I think that misinformation around health issues is saturated with occultism<\/a>. And that\u2019s more problematic than the link between modern postural practice and the far right.\u201d <\/p>\n

Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a> to get more English-language news coverage from EL PA\u00cdS USA Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stewart Home, 63, is a legend of British counterculture: a director, writer, playwright, and activist, famous for his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69,14298],"class_list":{"0":"post-29681","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-yoga"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}