Fascist Yoga and Far-Right Martial Arts

In mei 2025 verschijnt het nu al spraakmakende nieuwe boek van Stewart Home, Fascist Yoga. In de publicatie traceert Home de ongemakkelijke connecties tussen de fitness- en yoga-industrie, occultisme, witte suprematie en fascisme. Voor rekto:verso fileert hij enkele ontstellende cases van die verstrikking. Nooit zal naar de gym gaan, aikido beoefenen of yoga doen nog hetzelfde zijn – laat staan ‘weerwolf worden’.

In my new book Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists & The New Order In Wellness, my focus is the connections between right-wing politics and modern postural practice. That said, similar crossovers can be found in other areas of the fitness industry and they are certainly prominent in the martial arts. Walking around the newly erected high-end City Road residential towers in Islington (Inner London) recently, I couldn’t help but notice how depictions of such exercise, and the promise of participation in it, were being deployed to sell luxury apartments to rich international investors.

One gated ‘community’ ran a massive video ad in its foyer that featured heavy promotion for a private yoga studio within this ‘exclusive’ apartment complex. Two others had gyms taking up ground floor space. One of the exercise studios was UBX (pronounced You Box), which offers a programme combining strength training and boxing. The other sports facility at the bottom of an apartment block was London’s ‘first’ UFC gym – which, if it actually opens, will provide a combination of strength and mixed martial arts training. Its branding ties it to the Ultimate Fighting Championship and so right-wing talking points will be part and parcel of membership.

As this piece was going to press there was widespread media coverage of American UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell praising Hitler and engaging in Holocaust denial. This is the tip of an iceberg since a number of American UFC fighters have championed QAnon conspiracy theories. The promotion also has close ties to populist US President Donald Trump and former right-wing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Other links between martial arts and the far-right are described below.

Right-wing talking points will be part and parcel of gym membership.

Returning to the Islington luxury apartment blocks, the yoga studio appeared aimed primarily at women and the fight-themed gyms more at men. If a heteronormative couple went their separate ways to exercise, they could meet afterwards in one of the overpriced bars or restaurants housed at the bottom of other luxury residential blocks in the EC1 area, or buy food to cook at home from flash shops such as Tian Tian, another ground level business in the new builds on City Road. That said, judging by the number of cycle couriers zooming past me, it looked like those eating at home were ordering in takeaway food anyway.

Martial Arts Tall Tales

Panamanian-born and Chicago-based Frank Rudolph Young (1911–2002) authored several books on modern postural practice back in the day, such as Yoga For Men Only (1969), and if he was alive he’d fit right in at a UFC gym because he also wrote bodybuilding and self-defence manuals. Misogyny and other far-right obsessions were central to Young’s worldview, and in Fascist Yoga I compare him to both pickup artists – men who study and practice seduction techniques in order to dominate women – and the notorious woman hater and one-time professional kickboxer Andrew Tate.

Young often combined his physical culture pursuits with an interest in the occult, as is evident from the title of his 1974 tome Somo-Psychic Power. Anyone with an interest in ‘bullshido’ – fraud in the martial arts – will find Young’s discussion of the boxer Harry Greb in Somo-Psychic Power has a familiar ring to it. Young claims:

‘My uncle, while studying dentistry in Chicago, sought him out, got to know him intimately, and extracted from him the secret of his fantastic fistic abilities. We researched this secret in our physiological-psychic power laboratory and found that Greb had mastered the power of producing the “feverish muscle music” of the adrenal trance … It amounts to a drugless stimulation of your body. To do so, you transform yourself into an animal of multi-power, as into a werewolf or lunatic. […]

Stare into your mirror from across the room, visualising the horizon “elevating” all around you and the visual space swiftly drawing close to you, as if closing in on you …. This sparks your adrenals into action. Spur them on by “seeing,” as convincingly as you can, the physical invincible transformation you are trying to bring about in yourself. […]

See your jaws protrude still farther, and your nose flatten out and join into your swollen cheeks. […] See your shoulders and hips draw downwards, into your upper arms and legs, and your arms and legs shorten and fit solidly into your hips and shoulders. See your front teeth shrink fast, but your canines lengthen and taper into sharp points. See the broad, biting surfaces of your molars bevel into knife-like edges.

See your fingers shorten to half their length, and your fingernails thicken, curve and point. See your hair sprout thickly all over. See yourself transformed so completely into a werewolf that your image in the mirror turns terrifying! And see it all so realistically that you feel like a wild animal, ready to release a beast-like roar. […]

Explore mentally now, like such an animal. Spring forth, baring your teeth and claw and tear like a tiger. Your adrenal glands will flood your bloodstream with fighting adrenalin. Your physical power will turn super-human, and your movements savage and lightning-like. You will feel no pain, even if stabbed. Claw, kick, bite, and dig with your fingers, and snort, as if gone berserk. Any blows you receive now will only excite the nociceptive reflex in you. With this reflex you fight back harder when hurt. You are now like the true schizophrenic, or like a werewolf – or many times more powerful and unconquerable than your normal self. You are attacking with the feverish muscle music of the adrenal trance!

Even if you are a woman, practice turning into a pseudo-werewolf. You never know when you will be assailed. It will catch the criminal by surprise and throw him into a paralytic “adrenal freeze.” And your diabolical clawing will rout him.’

Young’s description of ‘becoming’ werewolf reads as if it is lifted from a fictional parody of martial arts tall tales, but it isn’t.

Young’s description of ‘becoming’ werewolf reads as if it is lifted from a fictional parody of martial arts tall tales, such as John F. Gilbey’s Secret Fighting Arts of the World (1963), but it isn’t. That said, it is difficult to understand how one would have time to use a technique which requires several minutes of imaginative thinking when attacked unexpectedly in the street or elsewhere. You’d also need to carry a mirror with you at all times, so that before engaging in self-defence you could stare into it to kick-start your transformation into a horror film monster.

The description of this fighting technique is followed by case studies including one titled ‘How Debra H Routed a Big, Sex-Crazed Assailant’. When a bully snatches Debra’s purse and hits her, she transforms herself into a pseudo-werewolf just the way Young had taught her and ‘ripped and kicked’ at her assailant ‘like a tigress.’ Her attacker ‘fled, his face ripped to shreds.’

As a self-defence technique becoming werewolf appears about as likely to work as the moves taught by ki aikido expert Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) for disarming an attacker armed with a knife or a gun. Aikido: The Co-ordination of Mind and Body for Self-Defence (1966) contains Tohei’s technique for disarming a gunman on whom your back is turned: ‘When he aims his gun at you from behind … You turn your face and hips in one motion, move out of the bullet’s path and then, turning your body, can use Kote-Gaeshi.’

By Kote-Gaeshi, Tohei is invoking an aikido technique in which the opponent’s wrist is bent inward and the attacker is then thrown. The first photo illustrating this shows Tohei with his hands up and a gun pointing into his lower back centimetres from his spine. In a second picture, Tohei has moved to the side of the gunman and grabbed his right wrist since that hand is holding the pistol. How Tohei knew the gunman wasn’t left-handed before making his turn isn’t explained.

Tohei’s ki aikido is a blend of martial arts and the Japanese yoga taught by Tempū Nakamura. Tohei’s fighting sensei was the notorious right-winger and aikido founder Morihei Ueshiba, his yoga master Nakamura not only had dodgy far-right leanings but also claimed an Indian guru lineage that is apparently fake since no one has ever been able to verify it. Glen Barclay offers the following comment on Tohei’s self-defence strategies in the book Mind Over Matter (1973):

‘The reader must of course realise that the techniques recommended by Tohei against an opponent armed with a knife will work only if one has developed occult powers of precognition. If one has any doubt about how well one’s ki is operating in such a situation, the only advice is really to throw something at your assailant to blind him, charge him with a chair or get a weapon with a longer reach than his blade.’

Swastika-Loving Yoga Groups

One of the men who paved the way for both Young and Tohei by mixing physical culture with occult beliefs was Felix Guyot (1880–1960). In his 1937 book Yoga: The Science of Health, Guyot offers the standard long life and health promise of fitness regimes but with an added mystic bonus:

‘Man, like his inferior brothers (animals), is made organically to enjoy a stable adult life, equal approximately to eight times his period of development. The normal length of his existence should be comprised between two hundred and two hundred and fifty years at least. Disease should only be for him a quite exceptional case except during a short old age. If it is not so, it is because man, from immemorial times, has deviated from the biological laws inherent in his species. In a word, he does not live, he no longer knows how to live, as the human animal should.’

In Yoga: The Science of Health, nonsense about the fabulous results of Guyot’s breathing and relaxation exercises provides a lure for naive readers to pursue them:

‘If these exercises are practised daily, one finds that one needs to take a much smaller quantity of food. But no ill consequences arise from that, on the contrary, and it is one of the best preventatives of stoutness. In reality one feeds on Prana. And so, when this exercise is performed at high altitudes (where Pranic energy is both pure and abundant), it enables fasting to be accomplished for long periods without any physiological indisposition or appreciable weakening resulting. Certain Yogis (but I am speaking of quite exceptional cases) living at altitudes between sixteen and twenty thousand feet, are able to live almost exclusively on water and Prana by employing methods very similar to this one.’

Sadly the belief that it is possible to give up eating and live on prana has been promoted for decades by breatharian cults – and while the leaders of these sects would obviously be dead if they practiced what they preach, some of their followers take their claims at face value and end up dying of starvation. Given the absurdity of Guyot’s assertions, it is little surprise to find him opining in his book, written at a time when fascism was in the ascendant in Europe, that:

‘The problem confronting the Hatha Yoga adept is this: “how to act according to one’s personal rhythm?” The Hindu civilisation which is so difficult to understand when one is ignorant of the influence that Yoga has exercised on it, formerly sought the solution of this problem by re-establishing the homogeneity of the communities through the institution of castes. This was rendered easier, because, at the same period, a human group which was already very unified, the Aryans, were settling in India, then peopled by very different races, for the most part negroid. The experiment that is now being attempted in Germany proceeds from an analogous inspiration. Unhappily, it affects to-day some human elements which are much too differentiated for it to prove successful. The unity of the German race is a myth.’

White supremacism in yogic discourse predates its earliest fascist turns.

Guyot’s problem with Nazism was not that it was racist and authoritarian but rather that it applied the lessons that he believed yoga contained about race and hierarchy incorrectly. As I detail in Fascist Yoga, many of yoga’s boosters in the first half of the twentieth century were convinced that modern postural practice was invented by the ‘Aryans’ who’d invaded the Indus Valley on the Indian subcontinent five thousand years ago. Identifying as Aryans themselves, these fascists and white supremacists viewed yoga as part and parcel of their racial inheritance.

White supremacism in yogic discourse predates its earliest fascist turns. It was with Italian ‘war hero’ Guido Keller’s swastika-loving YOGA group, active around 1920, that the avant-gardism of the futurist movement was merged with western neo-hinduism and proto-hippie back-to-the-land ideals to create an early fascist counterculture. Contemporary counterparts to this can be found in the wellness world where yoga moms embrace the ideology of pastel QAnon.

Countercultural fascist ideologies operate as openly in our times as they did in Keller’s day, but they are now far more widespread than either before or after the military defeat of fascism in the middle of the twentieth century. The ongoing influence of this propaganda and its re-emergence in recent years is something I look at in detail in Fascist Yoga.

This article was published in the context of Come Together, a project funded by the European Union.