Evola is enigma to many, but not to Bannon

Those trying to divine the roots of Stephen Bannon’s dark, and at times apocalyptic worldview, have repeatedly combed over a speech that Bannon, President Donald Trump’s ideological guru, made in 2014 to a Vatican conference, where he expounded on Islam, populism and capitalism.

But for all the examination of those remarks, a passing reference by Bannon to an esoteric Italian philosopher has gone little noticed, except perhaps by scholars and followers of the deeply taboo, Nazi-affiliated thinker, Julius Evola.

“The fact that Bannon even knows Evola is significant,” said Mark Sedgwick, a leading scholar of Traditionalists at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Evola, who died in 1974, wrote on everything from Eastern religions to the metaphysics of sex to alchemy. But he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.

Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather.

They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a bourgeoisie-smashing new order that he called the Solar Civilisation. Today, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works.

More important for the US administration, Evola also caught on in the United States with leaders of the alt-right movement, which Bannon nurtured as head of Breitbart News and then helped harness for Trump.

“Julius Evola is one of the most fascinating men of the 20th century,” said Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who is a top figure in the alt-right movement, which has attracted white supremacists, racists and anti-immigrant elements.

In the days after the election, Spencer led a Washington alt-right conference in chants of “Hail Trump!” But he also invoked Evola’s idea of a prehistoric and pre-Christian spirituality — referring to the awakening of whites, whom he called the Children of the Sun.

Stark difference

Spencer said “it means a tremendous amount” that Bannon was aware of Evola and other Traditionalist thinkers.

“Even if he hasn’t fully imbibed them and been changed by them, he is at least open to them,” he said. “He at least recognises that they are there. That is a stark difference to the American conservative movement that either was ignorant of them or attempted to suppress them.”

Bannon, who did not return a request for comment for this article, is an avid and wide-ranging reader. He has spoken enthusiastically about everything from Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’ to ‘The Fourth Turning’ by William Strauss and Neil Howe, which sees history in cycles of cataclysmic and order-obliterating change.

His awareness of and reference to Evola in itself only reflects that reading. But some on the alt-right consider Bannon a door through which Evola’s ideas of a hierarchical society run by a spiritually superior caste can enter in a period of crisis.

“Evolists view his ship as coming in,” said Professor Richard Drake at the University of Montana, who wrote about Evola in his book ‘The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy’.

Evola, who has more than annoyed people for nearly a century, seems to be having a moment.

“When I started working on Evola, you had to plough through Italian,” said Sedgwick, who keeps track of Traditionalist movements and thought on his blog, Traditionalists.

“Now he’s available in English, German, Russian, Serbian, Greek, Hungarian. First I saw Evola boom, and then I realised the number of people interested in that sort of idea was booming.”

Born in 1898, Evola liked to call himself a baron and in later life sported a monocle in his left eye.

A brilliant student and talented artist, he came home after fighting in First World War and became a leading exponent in Italy of the Dada movement, which, like Evola, rejected the church and bourgeois institutions.

Evola’s early artistic endeavours gave way to his love of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he developed a worldview with an overriding animosity toward the decadence of modernity. Influenced by mystical works and the occult, Evola began developing an idea of the individual’s ability to transcend his reality and “be unconditionally whatever one wants.”

Under the influence of Rene Guenon, a French metaphysicist and convert to Islam, Evola in 1934 published his most influential work, ‘The Revolt Against the Modern World’, which cast materialism as an eroding influence on ancient values.

Writings on race

It viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth.

Changing the system, Evola argued, was “not a question of contesting and polemicising, but of blowing everything up”.

Evola’s ideal order, Drake wrote, was based on “hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual”.

That made a fan out of Benito Mussolini.

The dictator admired Evola’s early writings on race, which influenced the 1938 Racial Laws restricting the rights of Jews in Italy.

Mussolini so liked Evola’s 1941 book, ‘Synthesis on the Doctrine of Race’, which advocated a form of spiritual, and not merely biological, racism, that he invited Evola to meet him in September of that year.

Evola eventually broke with Mussolini and the Italian Fascists because he considered them overly tame and corrupted by compromise. Instead he preferred the Nazi SS officers, seeing in them something closer to a mythic ideal. They also shared his anti-Semitism.

Bannon suggested in his Vatican remarks that the fascist movement had come out of Evola’s ideas.

As Bannon expounded on the intellectual motivations of Russian President Vladimir Putin, he mentioned “Julius Evola and different writers of the early 20th century who are really the supporters of what’s called the Traditionalist movement, which really eventually metastasised into Italian fascism”.

The reality, historians say, is that Evola sought to “infiltrate and influence” the Fascists, as Sedgwick put it, as a powerful vehicle to spread his ideas.

In his Vatican talk, Bannon suggested that although Putin represented a “kleptocracy”, the Russian president understood the existential danger posed by “a potential new caliphate” and the importance of using nationalism to stand up for traditional institutions.

“We, the Judeo-Christian West,” Bannon added, “really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as Traditionalism goes — particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism

source : gulfnews