I personally believe that the CIA/DIA and allied organizations pumped up this shit- in the 60's and 70's especially- because the people and ideas concerned were
Julius Evola
Julius Evola was born to an aristocratic family of Sicilian origins in Rome in 1898, and in his teens had been interested in Italy’s literary avant-garde movement and in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist movement in art. Evola participated in the First World War in his late teens before embarking on a quest for self-transcendence to break with bourgeois values, symptomatic of the “lost generation” which had experienced the First World War and could not adjust to settled civilian life.
After the war he dismissed Futurism as loud and showy and he instead became a member of the Dada artistic movement and gave readings of avant-garde poetry before giving up on painting due to the commercialization of avant-garde. He became influenced by German idealist philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Hegel and by Nietzsche and the Conservative Revolutionaries, and he indulged himself in “transrational” philosophy and published a number of works of “philosophical idealism”, according to which an “absolute individual” who had “achieved complete control over himself through wisdom” could easily eliminate the limits of the “real world”. Evola subsequently immersed himself in the study of magic, the occult, alchemy and Eastern religions, and especially the Indian esoteric tradition of Tantrism, which complemented Western idealism in his quest for self-transcendence, and Evola perceived its secrecy and “elitism” as negating Western rationalism and democracy, in accordance to his anti-democratic and anti-modernist political thought rooted in his readings of Plato, Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, whose The Decline of the West Evola later translated into Italian.
Having immersed himself in the study of Western esoteric tradition in the 1920s, he met a Roman occultist named Arturo Reghini through Masonic and Theosophical circles. Reghini, who was devoted to renewing classical tradition in a fiercely pagan and anti-Christian spirit, was himself immersed in magic, alchemy and theurgy, and he edited two journals, Atanòr and Ignis, which covered initiate studies such as Pythagoreanism, yoga, Kabbalah and Egyptian Freemasonry. Reghini strongly influenced Evola in the years from 1924 to 1930, introducing him to traditional texts of alchemy, whose symbolism they regarded as universal key to the macrocosm of the universe and microcosm of man, and many articles and reviews by Evola were published in Reghini’s journal. Reghini and Evola considered the Roman patrician world and the imperial constitution to be the closest approximation to their ideal state and considered its strict hierarchy to represent a “higher, transcendental, absolute order”, which they believed the universalism of Christianity had allagedly negated and dissolved, supposedly presaging the “disorder of the modern world”.
A circle formed around Evola and Reghini, and in 1927 Evola founded the Group of Ur, an association of Italian intellectuals dedicated to studying the “esoteric and initiate disciplines with seriousness and rigor”. The Group of Ur published a monthly journal named Ur (renamed Krur in 1929) from 1927 to 1929, and Evola’s three-year affiliation with this group earned him a lifelong reputation of a theosophist crackpot, though Evola himself rejected theosophy as a “degenerate caricature of ancient wisdom”. Reghini, in a 1924 article in Atanòr, wrote that he had fifteen years earlier predicted the rise of a regime based on the ancient world and he had welcomed the rise of Fascism, and the Group of Ur performed rituals to inspire the fascist regime with the spirit of the Roman Empire.
Through Reghini, Evola came under the influence of René Guénon, a French orientalist and traditionalist who invoked the notion of a primordial Tradition which supposedly reflected itself in the “authentic religious traditions” of the East and West. Guénon was an occultist who was interested in Theosophy and Freemasonry and more especially in the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, which was then becoming popular in the West through Vivekananda. Guénon believed that Hindu Vedanta represented a “primordial Tradition” whose transcendent truths were also preserved in Islam and medieval Catholicism, and that the modern West had supposedly lost all connection with this tradition. According to Guénon’s book written in 1927, The Crisis of the Modern World, the West had “succumbed to a spiritual decline”, embraced materialization, and become focused on a “humanistic” concern of man’s importance and consciousness which allegedly replaced all transcendence with individualism. For Guénon, this was the fulfillment of the Hindu Puranic divisions of time, the four yugas, each successively shorter than the previous one and corresponding to the Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages of Classical Greek tradition, with the present age supposedly being the “Dark Age” or Kali Yuga. Evola was subsequently inspired by Guénon into organizing his thoughts around the central concept of the critique of modernity.
Beginning in 1925, Evola started writing political journalism with the goal of transforming fascism to fit his own ideas of spiritual aristocracy and monarchy by attacking the fascist regime for its proximity to the Church, its functionaries’ careerism and its dependence on the bourgeoisie and the masses. These attacks resulted in the publication in 1928 of his book Pagan Imperialism, in which he celebrated ancient Rome and condemned the Church and the universalism of both American democracy and Soviet Communism, and that same year he declared that the identification of Italian tradition with the Christian and Catholic Church was “the most absurd of all errors”. Mussolini was impressed and wrote an article in response to Reghini’s requests for the fascist regime to initiate an era of “pagan imperialism”. The regime’s goal of a Concordat with the Catholic Church and the Lateran Treaty of 1929 however destroyed the Group of Ur’s hopes of influencing the new order and Evola declared fascism a “laughable revolution”.
In 1930, Evola founded a review named Torre to advocate for an elitist conservatism in opposition to what he denounced as the demagogic tendencies of official fascism. Fanatical anti-Semite Giovanni Preziosi admired Torre and introduced Evola to Roberto Farinacci, the local fascist chief in Cremona as well as one of the most prominent anti-Semites in Mussolini’s regime, and who later became one of the main pro-Nazi figures in fascist Italy. While Farinacci and the more radical fascists supported Evola’s calls for a “more radical, more intrepid, truly absolute fascism”, Mussolini instead did not tolerate this opposition, suppressed Torre and subjected its staff to a character assassination campaign, and Evola had to maintain a group of bodyguards, and Torre had died out by June 1930.
In 1934, Evola wrote The Revolt Against the Modern World, heavily influenced by René Guénon. Like Guénon, Evola believed in the Hindu cycle of ages and equated the modern world to the Kali Yuga, or “Dark Age”, and according to The Revolt Against the Modern World the West had experienced “a decline” from “higher spiritual values” to materialism, the rise of which Evola held responsible for liberalism, democracy, egalitarianism and democracy, all of which he considered evil, and he labeled Communism and capitalism as “twin evils” resulting from the replacement of the spiritual by the material. He condemned this “modern decadence” on the Renaissance, Humanism the Reformation and especially the French Revolution and considered this “decadence” to have started with the formation of the medieval Communes in Italy, which he saw as the “pioneers” of the “profane and anti-traditional idea of society based on economic and mercantile factors”. He instead applauded the poet Dante’s condemnation of the revolt of the cities of northern Italy, considered the Ghibelline dynasty of the Hohenstaufen emperors (which ruled from 1152 to 1272) as the “Germanic champion” of “sacred regality” in a revived Holy Roman Empire and praised Emperor Frederick I as having affirmed “the supranational and sacred principle” of empire against the “anarchy of the Communes”. Evola considered the rise of the Communes to be a preview of the French Revolution and blamed their revolt against the Holy Roman Empire for having destroyed the “organic unity” of Italy by starting a long period of instability and civil wars while Spain, England and France were emerging from the Middle Ages under strong national monarchies. In contrast, he appealed to the ancient pagan societies of Rome and Sparta and their patriarchal warrior culture, condemned the ancient Greek and Roman intellectuals for “causing the decline of traditional values” through their questioning, and claimed that a supposed need for a “spiritual virility” consisting of hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual constituted a “fundamental truth” of men and society. In Evola’s worldview, the world of tradition had been the victim of the process of modernization of Europe spearheaded by Italy, and the loss of this “spiritual virility” supposedly meant Man’s retreat from cosmos to chaos, the inability to create order and the disintegration of Europe.
Around the time of the publication of The Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola soon revived the idea of Torre in Farinacci’s own fascist publication, Regime Fascista. Evola edited a page in Regime Fascista where prominent right-wing intellectuals contributed discussions on fascist “philosophy”, and René Guénon allowed the publication of excerpts and translations of his works in Regime Fascista. Evola himself called on the fascist regime to adopt a more aggressive and imperialist foreign policy on this page, and on the eve of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, he advised Mussolini to transform Italy into a “warrior nation” that would “appreciate and admire” the “sacred valor of war”. Evola became Farinacci’s candidate to succeed Giovanni Gentile as the philosopher of true fascism, though this succession never happened. Evola’s relationship with Regime Fascista however continued until the collapse of the Fascist regime in 1943.
Evola had however always refused to join the Fascist Party even though he had up to a point seen fascism as a “cure” for the supposed “ailments” he believed had allegedly been “caused by American capitalism and Soviet Communism”, and his relationship with Italian fascism was complicated. For him, the “greatest merit” of fascism was “to have revitalized in Italy the idea of a State” and he approved of the fascist motto of “Everything within the State, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”, in accordance to his belief that “Man must belong to a traditional, organic and hierarchical order”. Evola saw Mussolini as working towards this direction through his replacement of parliamentary democracy by fascist corporatism and by imposing a culture of discipline against the “bourgeois spirit” (Evola considered the “glory” of fascism to be its war on the behalf of “Roman ideals” against the “bourgeois race”). He however disapproved of the fascist regime’s bureaucratic centralism and its alliance with the Catholic Church, of the fascist party’s sidelining of the aristocracy and the monarchy and Mussolini becoming a rival of the king instead of his loyal counselor and forming a traditional state, and thought the Fascist Party should have been merged into the state after Mussolini seizure of power instead of existing as a parallel state.
Evola found Italian fascism to be too compromising and from the mid-30s onward he spent time in Germany, where he felt “in his natural element” and where his books were successful among right-wing German intellectuals. In his view, fascism had “attained its most sublime form” in Germany because right-wing thinkers such as leading Conservative Revolutionaries had been taken seriously by the Nazis. Evola himself became popular in those circles after he started lecturing at the University of Berlin and the city’s Herrenklub from 1934, with his articles being published in German right-wing and conservative periodicals from 1928 to 1943, and he sought to create an elite organization similar to the Herrenklub in Rome. Evola admired Hitler far more than Mussolini, and he admired the Nazi SS, considered them to be a vehicle of the state, hierarchy, “racial heritage” and a revival of ancient pagan warrior elites and he compared them more favorably to the Moschettieri di Mussolini, though the SS rejected Evola’s ideas as supranational, aristocratic and reactionary. What he liked most about Nazi Germany was the regime’s “attempt to create a kind of new political-military Order with precise qualifications of race”, though he disliked Nazi populism, plebeian culture and nationalism as manifestations of modernity, and considered the Führer principle by which Hitler derived his legitimacy from the Völk as ignoring transcendent reality
Evola was a racist, though he rejected the biological racism of the Nazis, which he saw as “based on reductionist and materialist science”, and he instead adhered to a spiritual conception of racism where he considered race as not solely biological, but subject to spirit and tradition, with his conception of “race” being divided into body, mind (religion and adherence to tradition) and soul (character and emotions), and he asserted that races only declined when their spirit failed. Evola’s interpretation of the word “Aryan” was similarly metaphysical and in his book on Buddhism he translated arya to mean “aristocratic” or “high caste” and “illuminated” as well as related to the populations who migrated into northern India at the end of the Bronze Age, and whom now discredited white supremacist theories then claimed were “light-skinned Nordic invaders”. Evola was a virulent anti-Semite, and he quoted the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to accuse the “Jewish press and finance” of spreading the “liberal virus” which would supposedly destroy all remnants of monarchy and aristocracy, and he published his own preface and an essay in the Italian translation of the Protocols. When his friend, Romanian fascist and Iron Guard founder and leader Corneliu Codreanu, was murdered in 1938, Evola responded with the vilest anti-Semitic tirades.
In his book written in 1941, The Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race, Evola expressed his anti-Semitism by accusing Jewish culture of possessing a “corrosive irony” which according to him had allegedly “affected Europe” and by blaming Jewish intellectuals for “demolishing the foundations of Europe’s traditional culture”. Evola however saw the Nazi musings on race as polemicism and expediency and he considered their conspiratorial view of history as a “demagogic aberration”: he instead believed that racism could have “positive results” if interpreted in Nietzschean terms of spirit instead of biological terms of blood. Likewise, his anti-Semitism instead was metaphysical and he saw Jewish people as a “symbol for the rule of money, individualism and economic materialism in the modern world”. Evola denigrated Judaism as having “degenerated into a secular ethic of professional advancement and mammonism”, and he accused Jews of supposedly “poisoning, debasing and soiling all that is high and noble”. Instead of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic conspiracy theories which accused Jews of being the source of the “decadence” of the modern world, Evola’s own anti-Semitism consisted of him accusing Jewish people of supposedly “taking advantage” of humanism, the Reformation and the rise of rationalism to allegedly “rise to lofty heights of power and influence in the modern world” and “subvert ‘Aryan’ spirituality” and “create the secularized scientistic and mechanistic world of modernity”: he described banking and rational calculation in early Europe as “fatal Jewish influence” and claimed that the presence of individuals who happened to be Jewish in both the Russian Revolution and American banking and industry was “evidence” of “erosive influence”. Evola’s anti-Semitism also took the form of him citing the Jewish backgrounds of Sigmund Freud (the founder of psychoanalysis), Albert Einstein (the developer of the Theory of Relativity), Karl Marx (the theoretician of Historical Materialism), and Émile Durkheim (the architect of social science) to accuse Jews of allegedly being “at the forefront of modernistic ideas” and of supposedly “denigrating lofty ideas by ascribing every human motive to economic and sexual motives”.
Another manifestation of Evola’s racism was that the asserted that in Italy “Nordic elements” coexisted in perpetual anarchy with “African” and “Mediterranean” elements, and he claimed that this was an “absence of psychic equilibrium” which supposedly “explained” the “complex, creative and infuriating history of the Italian people”, and Evola’s writings provided a theory of “Nordic Romanità” to Mussolini, who since 1921 had been trying to create a “new type breed of man in Italy” by “introducing a higher civic consciousness” among Italians. Evola believed in the existence of “inferior peoples” and he advocated for the imposition of social Darwinism on all areas which later came to be known as the Third World by claiming that some “races” supposedly possessed an alleged “dominant character” and that some others were allegedly “intended by nature to be slaves”, and his remarks about the Ethiopians, who were later terrorized and colonized by Fascist Italy, showed how his views concurred with Mussolini’s fascist imperialism. Evola supported the fascist regime’s attempt to create “a race imbued with a traditional and anti-materialistic conception of human nature”, though he was disappointed by how the fascist regime did not realize this goal and he complained that Mussolini failed in his plan to “improve the race”.
From as early as 1935, Mussolini had already admired Evola’s articles on race and his Fascist regime officially adopted Evola’s ideas when Italy enacted its own racial laws in 1938, and Mussolini was impressed by The Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race, with a subsequent printing carrying the title The Synthesis of the Fascist Doctrine of Race; when Mussolini finally met Evola in September 1941, he promised to support Evola’s German-Italian journal, Blood and Spirit, though by then the Italian fascist regime was already losing the Second World War and Blood and Spirit never appeared. Until 1941 Evola had been hoping that the process of “fascistization” would “correct the manifold defects” of the Italian people though, after the Fascist Grand Council overthrew and arrested Mussolini in 1943 and the outbreak of the Italian Civil War opposing the Communist Italian Resistance to the fascists, he declared that “a damaged and inconsistent human component” had been hidden under the facade of fascism and that “it was not fascism that acted negatively on the Italian people” but that it was the Italian “race” which had “acted negatively on fascism”, and he lamented that the Italians had not fought “until the end without a lament and without a rebellion” unlike the Germans who “fought on” because of their supposed “love of discipline”.
Evola was in Berlin when Italy officially surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, and he was among the first to meet Mussolini in Hitler’s lair after the Waffen-SS officer Otto Skorzeny had freed him from imprisonment. He subsequently participated in the creation of the fascist Republic of Salò, and in September 1943 he returned to Rome with Farinacci and started organizing a far-right group called Movimento per la Rinascita dell’Italia. Evola however disapproved of the pseudo-egalitarianism of Mussolini’s new government and of the Congress of Verona, held in November of that year, where the Italian fascist movement was reconstituted. When Rome was liberated by the Allies in June 1944, Julius Evola fled to Vienna where he sought to assist the Nazis by working with fascist leaders all over Central Europe and acting as liaison for the SS as Nazi Germany tried forming a “European army” against the United States and the Soviet Union. He was injured during an aerial bombardment of Vienna, his wounds forcing him to remain in Austria until the war was over and paralyzing him from the waist down and forcing him to remain in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Following the war, Evola returned to Italy, though he regarded its liberation by the Allies as an “unmitigated disaster” which would lead Italy to embrace liberalism. He was however popular among young Italian neo-fascists, largely because his reputation had not been ruined by the war. Though Evola rejected participation in party politics, rejecting even the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) formed by veterans of the Republic of Salò he had once helped create, he was however influential among the Italian neo-fascist Right, especially among the more radical sections of the MSI which formed an evoliani faction within the MSI led by Pino Rauti, himself a disciple of Evola. In the 40s, Evola guided this faction towards more reactionary positions through his writings in La Rivolta Ideale, the journal of the MSI, and later through his pamphlet titled Orientamenti (Orientations), written in 1950. Giuliano Salierni, a young MSI activist in the 40s and early 50s, later recalled how he and other young MSI members visited Evola to listen to his accounts of working with the Nazis and his calls for violence against Communists.
In Orientamenti, Evola described Europe as “afflicted” by the same condition as Italy’s for centuries whereby it had become weakened and “dominated by stronger outside powers”: for him, the French and Spanish invasions of Italy of the 15th and 16th centuries had caused a “moral devastation” in Italy and left it disoriented, and he claimed that its 20th century analogue was the domination of Europe by the US and the USSR. In Orientamenti, Evola called for the “European man” to “rise again” by embracing an “aristocratic conception of life” to renew himself spiritually, and for his “brothers in the new battle array” to see capitalism and Bolshevism as “degrees of the same illness” and the US and the USSR as “two branches of the same evil”. In Orientamenti, Evola stressed the “warrior ethic” and “legionary spirit” and outlined how ideals, elites and order could be maintained with the MSI, the police and the army taking over the state. He however warned his followers against subversion, on grounds that it would not work and would condemn the “aristocratic revolution” to failure, and instead advised them to “prepare silently the spiritual ambience” form when a new form of authority would form and to “advance with pure force when the moment strikes”.
In 1951 Evola and twenty neo-fascists were arrested and tried for attempting to revive the Fascist Party, which is illegal in Italy’s post-war constitution. Evola was also accused of being the inspirer of the Fasci of Revolutionary Action, a violent shadow organization of the MSI which carried out the far-right’s strategy of tension through indiscriminate bombings and aggression against Communists. Evola defended himself by claiming that he could not be held responsible for how his books were interpreted and the case against him came to nothing since he had never been an official member of the Facist Party or of neo-fascist organizations, and he continued agitating for far-right causes and remained the guru of the neo-fascist Right in Italy until his death in 1974.
While remaining an independent intellectual, Evola was still influential among Italian neo-fascists whose members described themselves as the “generation of 1945”, hailed Evola as a “celestial warrior” and were opposed to both American capitalism and Soviet Communism. In 1956, he wrote Men Among the Ruins for this new generation of neo-fascists, with an introduction by Junio Valerio Borghese, a veteran of Mussolini’s fascist regime and one of the most influential figures of Italy’s post-war neo-fascist Right. In Men Among the Ruins, he argued that the task of the Right in the post-war years was a counter-revolution, or, more accurately, a “conservative revolution”, which consisted, politically, of outmaneuvering the Christian Democratic Party (DC) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), who for him respectively represented American capitalism and Soviet Communism, and, ideologically (and by borrowing from Marxist Antonio Gramci’s ideas on cultural hegemony and counter-hegemony), of forming a counter-hegemony against the DC and the PCI (which he considered the hegemonic forces in Italy) which would be led by a minority elite of reactionary “supermen” adhering to an anti-bourgeois, warrior view of life. However he held that mainstream Italian conservatives had “played into the hands of the Left” by attaching themselves to the capitalist order and that his revolution should not be based on bourgeois sociopolitical structures, but on the the state and “values and interests of a superior character” which transcend the economy.
However, with post-war capitalist growth and consumerism sweeping away the remnants of tradition, hierarchy and order, Evola had given up on these means and his 1961 book, Riding the Tiger, was more pessimistic. For him, feminism and women’s liberation, the progress of modernity and liberty, and the spread of drugs, sex and alcohol meant that the world had “entered the final period of Kali Yuga” and nothing of it was worth salvaging, and his solution for this was for the West to retrace its steps and turn to spirituality through an anti-modern and traditional philosophy. Evola’s recommendations to his disciples was to withdraw from the politics of nation-states: he identified with aristocrats like Bismarck and, like Bismarck who considered nationalism to be a dangerous modern development, he was distrustful of nationalism, which in the aftermath of the French Revolution had been used by the then Left to defeat the aristocratic order and was still a revolutionary force in the form of Third World anti-colonial struggles in the 60s. Instead, he thought that a “new European order” would arise from the remains of the Second World War: he called for a cooperation between the the European reactionary elites against American and Soviet occupation of Europe modeled on the international volunteers who had joined the Waffen-SS, who for him were reminiscent of the Order of Teutonic Knights, and he was encouraged by the emergence all across post-war Europe of neo-fascist organizations, whom he encouraged into a total way against the Left and the Center in a “revolutionary struggle” to restore Tradition.
Evola’s influence among Italian neo-fascists in the 60s was even stronger than it had been in the 50s. Evola became the figurehead of counter-revolution among the generation of 1968 and Giorgio Almirante, the leader of the MSI, called Evola “our Marcuse – only better”, in reference to the status of the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse as figurehead of the 1968 student movements and of the New Left. In the late 60s, many of Evola’s books were reissued and prominent neo-fascist leaders in the early 70s called him the “intellectual hero” of the militant neo-fascist movement in Italy and considered Riding the Tiger as its “breviary”. Evola was against accommodation with the liberal order, instead advocating for violence (Evola was fascinated by and agreed with Georges Sorel’s theories of violence), organizing the right-wing into a fighting force, calling on his followers to become “spiritual warriors” who would overthrow the liberal order through a “holy war” to establish a “metaphysical Regnum” and a “solar civilization” and declaring that, “It is not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing up everything”. The strategy of tension of neo-fascists in Italy escalated around this time, starting with the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan in 1969, which was one of the early episodes which marked the beginning of two decades of turmoil in Italy known as the Years of Lead, with numerous violent neo-fascists throughout this period using Evola’s works as inspiration. Evola, who had advocated a radical doctrine of anti-egalitarianism, anti-democracy, anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism, was the prime thinker of the Italian extra-parliamentary neo-fascist Right throughout the thirty years prior to his death in 1974.