Steve Bannon has been called Trump's Rasputin, and it is
scary to think about the alt-right ideologue influencing the world view of the commander-in-chief.
But if Bannon is Trump's Rasputin, exerting his malign influence on our chief
of state, Bannon is subject to a Rasputin, too — Italian thinker Julius Evola (1898-1974).
It's not rhetorical overkill to call Evola a fascist; he
identified as such and was comrade in arms of Mussolini, until he found fascism
too mild for him:
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/world/europe/bannon-vatican-julius-evola-fascism.html
Evola is two degrees of intellectual separation — a
mere two Rasputins — away from the mind of Donald Trump, which was bad enough
without intervention by any mind parasites at all.
NY Times 2/10/17
Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists
By Jason Horowitz
ROME -- Those trying to divine the roots of Stephen K.
Bannon's dark and at times apocalyptic worldview have repeatedly combed over a
speech that Mr. Bannon, President 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 Mr. 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
Civilization. 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 current American administration,
Evola also caught on in the United States with leaders of the alt-right
movement, which Mr. Bannon nurtured as the head of Breitbart News and then
helped harness for Mr. 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, Mr. 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. Photo
Evola, who died in 1974, is best known as a leading light of
Traditionalism.
Mr. Spencer said "it means a tremendous amount"
that Mr. 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
recognizes 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."
Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Prof.
Richard Drake at the University of Montana, who wrote about Evola in his book
"The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy."
For some of them, it has been a long time coming.
"It's the first time that an adviser to the American
president knows Evola, or maybe has a Traditionalist formation," said
Gianfranco De Turris, an Evola biographer and apologist based in Rome who runs
the Evola Foundation out of his apartment.
"If Bannon has these ideas, we have to see how he
influences the politics of Trump," he said.
A March article titled "An Establishment Conservative's
Guide to the Alt-Right" in Breitbart, the website then run by Mr. Bannon,
included Evola as one of the thinkers in whose writings the "origins of
the alternative right" could be found.
The article was co-written by Milo Yiannopoulos, the
right-wing provocateur who is wildly popular with conservatives on college
campuses. Mr. Trump recently defended Mr. Yiannopoulos as a symbol of free
speech after demonstrators violently protested his planned speech at the
University of California, Berkeley.
The article celebrated the youthful internet trolls who give
the alt-right movement its energy and who, motivated by a common and
questionable sense of humor, use anti-Semitic and racially charged memes
"in typically juvenile but undeniably hysterical fashion."
"It's hard to imagine them reading Evola," the
article continued. "They may be inclined to sympathize to those causes,
but mainly because it annoys the right people."
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 plow
through Italian," said Mr. 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 realized the number of people interested in that sort of idea was
booming."
Stephen K. Bannon, the former chief of Breitbart News and
now President Trump's chief strategist, was the main driver of President
Trump's rapid signing on Friday of the executive order on immigration, which
set off a political firestorm.
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 World War I and became a leading exponent in Italy of the Dada
movement, which, like Evola, rejected the church and bourgeois institutions.
Evola's early artistic endeavors gave way to his love of the
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 Renè Guènon, 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.
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 polemicizing, but of blowing everything up."
Evola's ideal order, Professor Drake wrote, was based on
"hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual."
That made a fan out of Benito Mussolini.
The dictator already 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.
Mr. Bannon suggested in his Vatican remarks that the Fascist
movement had come out of Evola's ideas.
As Mr. Bannon expounded on the intellectual motivations of
the Russian president, Vladimir V. 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 metastasized
into Italian Fascism."
The reality, historians say, is that Evola sought to
"infiltrate and influence" the Fascists, as Mr. Sedgwick put it, as a
powerful vehicle to spread his ideas.
In his Vatican talk, Mr. Bannon suggested that although Mr.
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," Mr. 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."
As Mr. Bannon suggested in his speech, Mr. Putin's most
influential thinker is Aleksandr Dugin, the ultranationalist Russian
Traditionalist and anti-liberal writer sometimes called "Putin's
Rasputin."
An intellectual descendant of Evola, Mr. Dugin has called
for a "genuine, true, radically revolutionary, and consistent fascist
fascism" and advocated a geography-based theory of "Eurasianism"
-- which has provided a philosophical framework for Mr. Putin's expansionism
and meddling in Western European politics.
Mr. Dugin sees European Traditionalists as needing Russia,
and Mr. Putin, to defend them from the onslaught of Western liberal democracy,
individual liberty, and materialism -- all Evolian bétes noires.
This appeal of traditional values on populist voters and
against out-of-touch elites, the "Pan-European Union" and
"centralized government in the United States," as Mr. Bannon put it,
was not lost on Mr. Trump's ideological guru.
"A lot of people that are Traditionalists," he
said in his Vatican remarks, "are attracted to that."
No comments:
Post a Comment