On Julius Evola
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On Julius Evola
Bruno Cariou
Outside Italy, J. Evola is considered above all as a metaphysician, a philosopher, a traditional thinker, an esotericist, for famous works such as Revolt Against the Modern World, Men Among the Ruins, Ride the Tiger, The Doctrine of Awakening and Introduction to Magic, all translated into most of the major Indo-European languages. In Italy, on the other hand, and to quote J. Evola himself in what may be called, for lack of a better word, his autobiography, Il Cammino del Cinabro (The Road of Cinnabar) (2), things appear in a different light : “Many people in Italy came to know me only as the author of a book on race and the label of racist, not easy to shake off, was given to me, as if I hadn’t turned my attention to anything else (…). In reality, I endeavoured to apply to the problems of race principles of a higher and spiritual nature; this field, to me, was completely subordinate (…). Even in this field, I was consistent in my behaviour, and, in the context of the whole of my work, there is nothing that I wrote then that I would now deny.” What those ‘principles of a higher and spiritual nature’ were, we shall see later on.
J. Evola’s racial writings stretch over five years, from 1936 to 1941, and yet it should not be assumed that his interest in the problem in question suddenly began in 1936 to vanish just as suddenly in 1941. Traces of an Evolian racial doctrine can be found in his numerous collaborations with the newspaper La Vita Nuova (from 1927) and with Giovanni Preziosi’s newspaper La Vita Italiana (from 1931), and, as early as 1928, Il Lavoro d’Italia published one of his articles in which, while refuting the Darwinian evolutionist theory, he denied beforehand all the solutions that Alfred Rosenberg was to propose to the problem of race for his own country two years later in The Myth of the Twentieth Century. J. Evola’s interest in the problem of race can even be detected in some of the articles he wrote for the ‘Ur Group’, through his focus on the concepts of élite, of hierarchy, of aristocratic nature and of Imperium. InRevolt Against the Modern World (1934), to which the reader of The Elements of Racial Education and of Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza (Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race) will be constantly referred, the spiritual categories put forward by Evola (‘Olympian’ or ‘solar’ race, ‘Demetrian’ or ‘lunar’ race, and so on), based on Bachofen’s morphology of cultures (Patriarchal society/Matriarchal society; Solar spirituality/Lunar spirituality ; aristocratic ethic/collectivist ideal) are imbued with racial considerations that are closely linked to a metaphysics of history, and, in The Doctrine of Awakening (1943), the Aryan nature of the earliest and purest Buddhist teaching is the subject of a whole chapter, and the ‘spiritual, aristocratic and racial meaning’ of the word ‘Arya’ itself is repeatedly stressed.
J. Evola wrote four books on the problem of race, whose titles are all explicit ; Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem (3) being the first ; it was published at the end of 1936, but it should be pointed out that its three chapters had previously appeared, over a period of a few weeks, several months earlier, in an Italian newspaper called Regime Corporativo ; there followed in 1937 Il Mito del Sangue (The Myth of Blood), a work commissioned by the publisher Hoepli. (4) Subsequently, Evola was asked to write the preface of the second Italian edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published by Giovanni Preziosi in 1938, a year that saw the promulgation of racial laws by Mussolini, justified and made necessary by the ceaseless attitude of hostility, which can be evidenced by many documents, of various international Jewish organisations against Europe and the European peoples, and dictated, to quote Evola, by “the will to brace the sense of race and of racial dignity in the relationships with the indigenes in the new empire”, as well as by “problems of an inner, selective, cultural and ethnic nature” (‘Mussolini e il Razzismo’). (5)
Following these first Italian racist laws, two Offices of Race were created, one in the Ministry of the Interior, the other in the Ministry of Popular Culture, “which, to explain and define essential aspects of the problems of race, (proposed) to develop a programme of research and propaganda, whose aim is to reveal to all Italian citizens the features of the Italian race and exalt its millennial virtue”, and, to this end, committed a small number of Italian academics to the task of determining the policy of Fascism on racial questions. The Manifesto del Razzismo Italiano (The Manifesto of Italian Racism) that emerged from this group the same year was published in the very first issue of La Difesa della Razza, edited by Telesio Interlandi, who, according to a scholar who studied Mussolini’s views on the Jewish problem, was commissioned by the Duce, in early 1937, to launch a racial and, later on, an anti-Jewish campaign through this paper. J. Evola started to collaborate from January 1939, with articles such as ‘Metodologia Razzista – I Tre Gradi del Problema della Razza’ (‘Racial Methodology – The Three Degrees of the Problem of Race’) and ‘Razzismo di Secondo Grado – La Razza dell’Anima’ (‘Racism of the Second Degree – The Race of the Soul’), whose content prefigured that of some chapters of J. Evola’s first organic work on the problem of race : Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza, which was published in 1941, again by Hoepli (6) ; finally, the same year, a collective lampoon, ‘Gli Ebrei Hanno Voluto la Guerra’ (‘The Jews Wanted War’), to which J. Evola contributed a text called ‘La Civilta Occidentale e l’Intelligenza Ebraica’ (‘Western Civilisation and Jewish Intelligence’) appeared, as did The Elements of Racial Education. (7) Before going any further, we would like to emphasise that the term ‘racism’ in J. Evola’s work must be understood as ‘racial theory’, as a theory of the hierarchy of races, not as an attitude of violent hostility against any given racial group.
After Mussolini read Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza, he not only explicitly authorised J. Evola to call the German edition Grundrisse der Faschistischen Rassenlehre (8) (Synthesis of the Fascist Doctrine of Race), and, therefore, to present J. Evola’s formulations as official Fascist positions, but he also invited him to collaborate with the Italian authorities to rectify some ambiguous positions assumed and spread by other Italian racial theorists, while supporting, to a certain extent, the initiatives taken by Evola
himself abroad, initiatives that consisted in creating in Germany and, in general, in the Austro-German world, an aristocratic traditional front, which, in collaboration with the best elements of Fascist Italy, would have endeavoured to halt and neutralise the corrosive action of the forces of subversion, all of which, from their democratic and liberal to their Marxist components, were known to be organised and ruled by a secret and unitary Jewish and Masonic conspiracy. For this purpose, Evola reckoned it was necessary to awake consciences by unmasking the tactics used by the forces of worldwide subversion to achieve their goals and by drawing people’s attention to the necessity of restoring as fundamental points of reference the root ideas and the myths related to the culture and the values of the ancient Roman Aryan and Nordic Aryan worlds : themes that he was to set out, analyse and explain during a set of lectures he gave in Germany and in Hungary in 1938, at the invitation of the very exclusive German aristocratic circles to which he belonged and of representatives of the Conservative-Revolutionary movement with which he had spiritual affinities. He had already lectured in Germany, though, back in 1934, at a university in Berlin, at the second Nordisches Thing in Bremen and at the Herrenklub of Heinrich von Gleichen, an aristocrat with whom he was to establish a “cordial and fruitful” friendship, and it is most likely at that time that Himmler first heard of him.
It seemed, for a while, that this tour had borne fruit, since, from 1939 to 1941, much was said about a collaboration between Fascist Italy and the Third Reich in the field of political and racial policy, under the care of the director of the Ufficio per lo Studio del Problema Razziale nel Ministero della Cultura Populare and the head of the Ahnenerbe, Walter Gross, whom J. Evola met at that time, along with A. Rosenberg. Further developments in this area were thwarted, mainly, according to J. Evola himself, because of pressures exerted by Catholic Italian circles on Mussolini and representatives of the ‘zoological’ Italian racism. Specifically, this German-Italian collaboration should have given birth to a bilingual German-Italian periodical meant to overcome the biological materialist reductionism linked with the Darwinian evolutionist theory : Sangue e Spirito – Blut und Geist (Blood and Spirit).
Let us permit Evola himself to sum up, still in ‘Mussolini e il Razzismo’, the situation in Italy at that time in this field, and, in doing so let us allow him to draw attention to one of his main reasons for focusing as he did on the one main point : “The whole thing presented few satisfactory features. As a matter of fact, for such purposes, in Italy, there was a lack of previous serious preparation and specific studies, and racial theory was completely unknown to Italian ‘intellectuals’. This is how the group that had drafted the Manifesto, and even the group of the contributors to La Difesa della Razza, came to seem so incoherent and unprepared. It was a mixture of some anthropologists of the old positivist school and opportunistic journalists and scholars who had turned into racists overnight. That is why the general impression was that of a dilettantism in which mere controversy and sloganeering too often held the place of a serious and homogeneous doctrine : a doctrine that would not have gotten bogged down either in biological specialisation or in gross anti-Semitism, but would have appeared in the form of a general vision of life, and acted as a politically and ethically formative idea. To a large extent, it was the
not very favourable judgments heard abroad on the racial revolution within Fascism that induced me to devote myself to such material.”
Modern forms of the theory of race, be they based on history, philology, biology, philosophy, anthropology or religion, were, as J. Evola pointed out repeatedly, filled with confusions, misinterpretations and ambiguities, so that, before he was able to reformulate them from a traditional point of view, he had to specify the true meaning of race, from first principles : “There are three ways to understand the theory and the very concept of the race : with reference to a reality, to a certain order of scientific knowledge and, finally, to a ‘myth’. According to the first way, the awareness of the value of the race already shows in a set of norms that are discernible in the ancient civilisations, particularly wherever the system of caste and the law of endogamy were in use, norms that in part were continued until relatively recent times in the specifically aristocratic traditions. This was an un-theorised but practical racism. This is why the word ‘race’ can be very seldom found in the ancient world : people did not feel the need to speak about race in the modern sense, because people had it. People were mainly interested, if ever they expressed interest at all, in the mystical forces that appeared behind those of the blood and the gens : for instance, in the Roman Patrician and, in general, Aryan cults related to the Lares, the Penates, and the archetypal heroes. But the necessity of preserving the blood, of maintaining and transmitting in its integrity a precious and irreplaceable inheritance linked to the blood, was distinctly perceived. That is why, in several cases, the contamination of a given blood appeared to the ancient, traditional, man, less as an offense of a social nature than as a true sacrilege. (…) The word ‘anthropology’ originally meant the science of man in general, considered both from physical and spiritual points of view. It was with such a meaning that the term was used in the ancient world, for example, by Aristotle, and it retained this meaning in some Western philosophical schools, until Kant. But in the development of Western culture a shift in point of view gradually took place. People became more and more accustomed to considering man not as a unique being within the created world, to be essentially understood on the basis of his supernatural origin and essence, but as one natural species among many others. Anthropology thus ended up assuming a new meaning: it was not a science of man as such any longer, but of man as a natural being, to which classificatory methods similar to those of zoology and botany could be applied : it was a natural science of man.
“In this way, attention was to be increasingly turned towards the corporeal and physical differences between human beings and the idea of there being several races of mankind gradually emerged, so that the idea of race became familiar and increasingly definite in modern anthropology through various elements supplied by biology and genetics. Race, therefore, became a scientific concept, not to say scientistic : it came to be based on knowledge of a ‘positive’ nature obtained with the classificatory and experimental method.
“In the third place, we have race as a ‘myth’ – it is essentially in these terms that the idea of race took shape in Europe in the last quarter of the 19th century, before it came to be part of renovating political movements, at first of National Socialism and then of Fascism. By ‘myth’, we do not mean a simple fiction, an arbitrary part of the imagination, but an idea that draws its force of persuasion mainly from elements that are not rational, an idea that is valuable above all for the evocative force that it condenses and, therefore, for its capacity to be expressed, finally, in action.” (9)
In Il Mito del Sangue, J. Evola attempts “to show the genesis of racial theory, or more precisely, of the various themes in it, after having stated very precisely its meaning ; (…) the sources that have fueled the ‘myth’, the influences that have gradually contributed to its formation and assertion in contemporary history,” while “sticking to the principle of the greatest objectivity.” In the first place, the antecedents of racial theory in the ancient traditions, such as the polygenist theory and the Biblical monogenist theory, are mentioned ; in the second place, the doctrine of Arthur de Gobineau, as well as the three main components of modern racial theory (first, philosophical ; second, anthropological ; and third, philological) that were to be synthesised by this ‘ancestor of racial theory’, are examined ; in the third place, besides the theory of heredity, racial typology and the arctic myth, H. S. Chamberlain’s theses are considered, in connection with the politicisation of racial theory and the part it had in post-war pan-German ideologies. Finally, the racial conception of history and the racial conception of law are presented, as well as the Jewish question, A. Rosenberg’s ‘new myth of blood’ and Hitler’s racism.
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And, as Evola himself mentions in the introduction to Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza three years later, “the general opinion is that this account is one of the most comprehensive ever written so far on the matter in Italy”. Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza will be “the second part, both critical and constructive, of ‘The Myth of Blood’”. In its introduction, J. Evola specifies the two main reasons that led him to conceive it. They are complementary: in the first place, the official incorporation of the concept of race into Fascism – and, in this connection, it must be borne in mind that J. Evola considers racial theory as an ‘instrument’, a ‘power’ of Fascism, to be looked upon, not as a contingent element in the Fascist ideology and spirit, but as inherent to it ; in the second place, there is the fragmentation of the concept of race in a vast number of theories, all more or less biologically and materialistically orientated, their controversial and propagandist use, which, by inviting the critique of the adversaries of racial thought, weakens fascism. Hence the imperative of a “comprehensive and coherent”, “really totalistic formulation of the doctrine of race”, if Fascism is to be fulfilled. By ‘totalistic’, J. Evola meant that
“‘morality’ had to rely on an active will, that is to say that, once the ‘revolutionary’ duty of integrating the Fascist doctrine has been entrusted to the ‘idea of race’, racial theory should rise above the level of a ‘particular discipline’ (of scientific nature) to the more general level of a ‘mentality’, thus penetrating all the cultural manifestations of a time.” (Gian Franco Lami). More than this, ‘totalitarianism’ can represent a positive political system to J. Evola, depending on which type of state it refers to : “As a matter of fact, the total state is not only a creature of necessity of modern times. Any traditional state was total, dogmatic, authoritarian. But there are two different ways to organise in a totalistic fashion, in the name of spirit and in the name of matter, in the name of what is superior to man and in the name of what, as mere collectivity, is inferior to him and sub-rational. Such is the difference between the great Supra-States of solar and traditional antiquity and the Bolshevik ideal.” (10) Specifically, J. Evola shows, in the first chapter of Sintesi, that the doctrine of race is a ‘revolutionary’ instrument, in that, by reinvigorating national feeling and racial pride, it opposes universalism; by substituting the organic value of personality for the Promethean ambitions of the individual, it fights individualism ; by going, through these values, beyond the paralysing antithesis of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, it makes rationalism irrational ; by considering history, not as an evolutionary process of a material nature, but as a spiritual involution, it invalidates evolutionism ; it undermines materialism and the ‘zoological’ racism it gave birth to, by showing that there is no pure race in the modern world and that ‘the mysticism of blood’ is a product of a purely biological conception of race.
In the same way, the doctrine of race conceived by J. Evola is to be considered as ‘totalistic’ (‘totalitario’) : “The central thesis that I defended was, in short, the following one”, Evola explains in ‘Mussolini e il Razzismo’ : “for man, the problem of race cannot be posed in the same terms, nor can it have the same meaning, as it can for a cat or for a thoroughbred horse. The real man, in addition to the biological and somatic part, is soul and spirit. Therefore, a comprehensive racial theory must consider all these three terms : body, soul and spirit. There will thus be a racism of the first degree, which addresses the strictly biological, anthropological and eugenic problems ; then, a racism of the second degree, which addresses the ‘race of the soul’, that is to say the form of the character and the affective reactions ; finally, as a crowning-piece, the consideration of the ‘race of the spirit’, which addresses the highest elements of the personality which, in regard to the general vision of the world and the beyond, destiny, life, action, in short, the ‘highest values’, differentiate and make men unequal. The classical ideal, racially interpreted, is the harmony and the unity of these three racial aspects in a higher type.” To characterise these three racial aspects will be the subject of the second and third chapters of Sintesi, which in addition deal with questions such as those of natural races and superior races, of the race of the spirit as formative force, of the Hyperborean race and its ramifications, of the group of the Aryan races, of the superior race in the Nordic man and in the Mediterranean race, of the inner race and heredity, of the sexes and race, which last leads J. Evola to put forth the audacious concept of the ‘race of man’ and the ‘race of woman’, and, as a preamble to the exposition of the principles of a racial theory of the spirit, enlightening observations on the problem of birth are made in the light of the Buddhist doctrines of karma and dharma. To define and distinguish the race of men and the race of women is in fact the first of the prerequisites that J. Evola, when he proceeds from the theory to its practical applications, adopts
as the principle of effective racial reform; “to acknowledge the reality of something super-biological, super-corporal, super-rational” is the second prerequisite. If J. Evola fully subscribes to the prophylactic and defensive measures meant for protecting the race of the body from alterations caused by racial mixing, he goes further and speaks of an ‘intra-racial discrimination’. The idea is that a race comprises several bloods, that one of them is higher than the others and that a time comes when this race must commit itself to this blood, choose the spiritual orientation that corresponds to its vocation, while, within this race, each individual must also make this choice, for, just as, among races, there are individuals whose higher nature predisposes them to occupy a central and leading part in history, there are, in a people, on the one hand, the élite, spiritual leaders, models of racial perfection, and, on the other hand, the people, in which race fulfills itself to a greater or lesser extent according to the individuals.
Three main elements are to contribute to this decisive vital choice and to support this harmonious organic process of racial rectification : the myth and the symbol, conceived of in a traditional fashion as the reflection of a supernatural reality, are “to galvanize and give shape to the emotional forces of a community” ; an “austere mysticism” ; finally, a “liturgy of power”. It must be borne in mind, however, that these conditions can only be met if an élite worthy of this name is in office ; to Evola, and this is a fundamental point, only a traditional state is able to provide the people with the means and the disciplines likely to spiritualise it, to lead it to a spiritual realisation according to the nature and the possibilities of each of its members. This élite J. Evola sees as an institutionalised one, as an Order.
The Elements of Racial Education, which was published, right in the middle of a ‘racial campaign’, in a collection of pedagogic and didactic studies, develops and specifies even further the points of reference given in Sintesi to achieve such a goal. As the title of the book shows, it is primarily meant for educators : “our duty in this small volume is of a very special nature : it is not a matter of abstract expositions as bases of a general ‘instruction or ‘information’, nor of exploring the doctrine in greater depth and detail, but of being more specific about the ideas – and even the ‘key ideas’ – needed by an educator to achieve, in the field of racism as in other fields, his true goal. Simple notions, but clear and saturated with suggestive forces, likely to act on the soul of the youngsters rather than on their intellect alone, so as to promote a certain formation of their will and a certain orientation of their highest vocations. The educator must always be fully aware, on this point, of the essentially political and ethical value that the theory of race must have in Fascism as well as in the Fascist school. He must fully realise the race in question is something very different from the one biology and anthropology could speak of until recently. (…) True racial philosophy, more than a special discipline, is a mentality.” Opposed to the narrow and distorted naturalist and biological points of view on race, J. Evola criticises and goes beyond them, referring in this connection to Clauss’ ‘psychanthropy’: race, to him, is a specific mentality, a hereditary style, a differentiated way of being. A race must be judged, not from its physical exteriority, its somatic features, but from its psychic interiority. The body, that is to say the racial features, is the means and ground of expression of a psycho-spiritual reality.
Because Clauss thought that the psycho-spiritual dimension of man does not belong to the same level as that of his corporeal, somatic and biological features, he was accused of reintroducing the Christian dualism between body and soul, as opposed to the traditional tripartite conception of man as spirit (in the supra-rational sense), body and soul, which was precisely the conception revived by J. Evola within the framework of the racial theory he put forward. As Renato del Ponte rightly notes, “if however Clauss, keeping his examination on the psychological level, could avoid establishing a hierarchy of the various races, Evola, who begins to consider the spiritual values of each race and tries to delineate a typology of the races of the spirit, must necessarily place each spiritual type along the degrees of a hierarchical scale. Just as Clauss was right to assert that ‘the objective value of a race could only be known by a man who would be beyond every race’, Evola is right to assert the superiority of the ‘solar race’ over the ‘titanic’, of the ‘heroic race’ over the ‘telluric’ : there is no contradiction between the positions of these two authors, since each of them applies his research to a different level. The level to which Evola’s is applied, or, to express it better, what is new in it in relation to that of other scholars in this field, allows the human being to know the objective hierarchical differences between the various ‘races of the spirit’, for the simple reason that it is in the spiritual element of man that the universal principle lies, able to place him ‘beyond every race’ and to make him foresee the real hierarchy of the spiritual types. Such an objective judgment, obviously, psychanthropy could not give, because the soul, the psyche lacks an element that transcends the individual subjectivity.”
In this connection, The Elements of Racial Education contains as an appendix an essay on ‘The Problem of the Supremacy of the White Race’, in which some have claimed to see an anticipation of differentialist views on the grounds that, since, to J. Evola, the conformity or not to one’s own tradition is the only valid criterion of superiority or inferiority for a given race or people, it follows that “any race can only be superior or inferior in relation to itself.” Those who will have fully understood and integrated the premises of the doctrine of race built by J. Evola from a traditional standpoint will immediately realise that this relativistic view leads to an absurdity. Since the ‘heroic race’ as such is superior to the ‘telluric race’ as such, it follows, for instance, that, if, at a given point in a given historical cycle, a given relatively fallen ‘heroic race’ can be objectively considered as inferior to a ‘telluric race’ still consonant with its own traditional form, the fact is that nevertheless a given ‘heroic race’ still consonant with its own archetype will still be objectively superior to a given ‘telluric race’ that shows the same degree of purity towards its own archetype. In short, ‘ethnic’ differentialism just forgets about hierarchy, which, whether one likes it or not, exists, and, in this, it is the victim of modern egalitarian prejudices.
However, the fact that the Jews occupy so many key positions in both public and private sectors in most Western countries, to the point of being in real effective control of their economies and, through them, their social, cultural and political policies, not to mention their mass media, cannot but lead any serious
lucid person, of whichever party, to wonder whether this could nevertheless be a sign of the inferiority of the white race, a fundamental question to which J. Evola brings a clear, straightforward, uncompromising answer in Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem, a work that condenses most of his considerations on the Jewish problem in the forty articles or so published from 1936 to 1941, in several Italian newspapers, most of which an Italian publisher was astute enough to compile, in 1994 in Il ‘Genio’ d’Israele (Israel’s ‘Genius’). In this, the most accomplished text he ever wrote as regards Judaism, J. Evola considers the effects that ensue from this reality in the spiritual world, in the cultural world and in the economic and social worlds. In addition to this there is, in the articles, an examination of the destructive action of the Jewish people throughout history, the part it has played in the attack upon the Aryan traditional world, and, therefore, in the construction of the modern world. In fact, J. Evola knew how to outline a comprehensive framework for the Jewish problem, which he analysed from all possible points of view. He avoids lingering over anthropological and biological analyses and focuses on the spiritual dimension, from which any historical manifestation proceeds.
J. Evola notes and emphasises the fact that the Jewish Law and tradition is based on a unity, a unity that remains despite the composite and heterogeneous nature of the human materia prima. “It is the Jewish Law that extracted from a chaos of ethnic waste the Jewish type and gave shape to it, essentially as a spiritual type.” (11) This formative force, this common spiritual legacy guarantees the unity of Israel, despite its dispersion in time and space, as well as the persistence of Jewishness as a set of stable hereditary tendencies, as an indestructible specific instinct, whether the Jew remains faithful to the Law or grows away from it.
The Jewish Law is centered on the ‘Promise’ that Israel would be God’s chosen people and would dominate all other peoples and possess their goods. Such a belief, which can already be found in the Old Testament, became even more pronounced in the Talmud, the Jewish oral tradition as interpretation of the Torah, whose violent expressions against the non-Jews are famous. The encounter with a world that denies the fundamental themes of the Jewish Law only reinforces the resentment of the Jew against peoples he sees as unjust and unfair. The Jewish Law thus only intensifies and legitimates the aversion to any non-Jewish people. “The Jew will sense in any society, in any regime, in any political organisation, an injustice, and, with respect to it, will always assert himself as a subversive, revolutionary or, at least, reforming element. (…) Hence the high percentage of Jews, on the one hand, in movements with democratic, Masonic, humanitarian and liberal ideologies, and, on the other hand, in movements of Marxist, Communist and anarchist revolutionary subversion.” (ibidem). And, on this anti-traditional front, the secularised Jew, grown away from his Law and left to himself, meets with the religious Jew. As a matter of fact, the typical features of the Jewish people, far from diminishing in a Jew that has been separated from his Law, become even more pronounced and his activity thus becomes even more
corrosive for Aryan values, for, without law, he has no more norms. Those who pretend to criticise anti-Semitism by asserting that most Jews have no connection with their Law in the modern society are thus on the wrong track. The proof is that it is precisely the Jews with a non-religious background who are the most efficient representatives and propagators of internationalism, Communism, rationalism, and of any other ideology that constitutes an attack against form, difference, hierarchy and the traditional spirit.
In addition to this there is the dualism between body and soul, a distinctive feature of the Jew, whether secularised or not – a dualism that, as the preface writer of Il ‘Genio’ d’Israeleremarks, was passed on to a large extent to Christianity, to become even more pronounced in Calvinism and Protestantism, all ‘lunar’ beliefs, and that can be referred, in the last analysis, to a specific aspect of the feminine psyche. The incapacity to overcome this sterile and destructive dualism produces imbalances and contradictions of every kind, and, at the end of the day, it is the body, the flesh that prevails, leading to an abstract spirituality and a gross sensualism. Hence the taste for the assertion of the omnipotence of the law of flesh, of earth, of sex, of matter and of gold. “To understand this inner situation means also to uncover the origins and causes of the nature that, almost without exception, is common to any sort of modern Jewish ‘creation’, be it in science or in economics, in literature or in music, in science of the religions or in psychoanalysis, in criminology or in anthropology, in law or in theatre, and so forth.” (ibidem).
While the Jew faithful to the Law resents and cannot but resent the peoples, the non-Jewish peoples, who do not recognise Israel as the ‘chosen people’, and, for this reason, tends to do everything he can, consciously or not, to subvert their values and the social and political organisation based thereon, the secularised Jew, again more or less consciously, driven as he is by race-old specific instincts, sees in the Messianic myth and the expectation of the Regnum an effective domination over every people. Israel offered all its faith to Yahveh and, as a reward, expects Yahveh to supply it with all the wealth of the earth, and this is how mercantilist principles become applied to the religious field. The second ‘column’ of Judaism is Jewish capitalism and the Jewish financial International, that found in the solidification, the materialisation of the modern world, to which it contributed by giving more and more power to economic factors and faceless and stateless capital, the ideal ground to develop its own instinct and to achieve its own goals.
Such were the premises assumed by J. Evola to analyse the undeniable Jewish problem in the larger context of racial thought in the 30s in Fascist Italy, taking advantage of a political situation that lent itself to such analysis. The spiritual climate, however, was not as favourable in later years to the development of racial philosophy and, within it, of anti-Semitism as set out by J. Evola, not to mention the fact that the war declared on the 24th of March 1933 by ‘Judea’ on Germany, the ally of Italy, did not precisely help to create a climate in which racial philosophy and anti-Semitism could have been examined in an objective and serene way, and that the course of the war and, even more, its outcome were to frustrate
any solution of the Jewish problem. J. Evola, throughout this process, remained always faithful to the Aryan traditional principles he fully endorsed, without ever lapsing into that gross racism and anti-Semitism he was the first to condemn : “On the plane of historical forces, I did not fail to show, not only the one-sidedness, but also the danger of a fanatical and visionary racism, even in the introduction I wrote for the new edition by Preziosi of the famous and most controversial Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I thus indicated how dangerous it was to think that Judaism alone is the enemy to fight : I was even led to see in this tendency the effect of one of the tactics of this war that I called the ‘occult war’ ; to ensure that all attention gets focused on a part of the whole is the best way to divert it from other parts and to keep on acting without being disturbed.”
The racial doctrine set out by J. Evola was not well received by the Italian racist camp at that time ; the criticisms presented against it are all based on the crassest form of biological and scientific racism, of the view, to sum them up, that “our racism must be that of flesh and muscles” (G. Almirante) ; they are mostly very similar to one another and result, at best, from a lack of understanding or, at worst, from a selective reading and bad faith.
Post-WWII critique is more worthy of attention, even though it still proceeds to a greater or lesser extent from a selective or superficial reading, and, because of the post-war demonisation of Fascism and National-Socialism and the Verjudung that has proceeded from the full internalisation of this traumatising representation by the vast majority of our contemporaries, it is burdened with a compulsive scholarly need to exorcise a deep sense of guilt by trying to more or less apologise with a most convincing sense of self-righteousness for J. Evola’s so-called “compromises” with Fascism and National-Socialism. Let us not dwell on this pronounced tendency, and let us not dwell either on the critical comments against the so-called ‘enthusiasm’ that he supposedly showed in using the word ‘Aryan’, which are not more grounded than those against his supposedly mistaken use of the term ‘anti-Semitism’. Except in the cases where mention is made of the historical Aryans, it is made clear that the word ‘Aryan’ is used in a typological sense ; besides, it is often used ironically to designate some contemporary German racists. With regard to the term ‘anti-Semitism’, the following excerpt from Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem shows that he was fully aware that it should not be used as a synonym for ‘anti-Judaism’ : “the term ‘Semitic’, as everyone knows, implies a far broader concept than the mere term ‘Jewish’. We will deliberately be using it here because we believe that the ‘Jewish’ element cannot be, purely and simply, separated from the general type of civilisation that formerly spread through the area of the Eastern Mediterranean from Asia Minor to the borders of Arabia – noteworthy though the differences between Semitic peoples may be.” Thus, whilst a clear distinction based on etymology is duly made between anti-Semitism in general and anti-Judaism in particular, what all Semitic peoples, including the Jews, have in common in cultural and racial terms is conversely emphasised.
Let us thus turn now to what stands as the work of reference in the field of Evolian studies on everything that concerns directly or indirectly the Italian author’s political views and action, namely, the preface and introduction to the American edition of Men Among the Ruins by H. T. Hansen, entitled ‘Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors’. Much of what is stated therein about the decisive influences on J. Evola’s thought, his artistic experiences, his philosophical period, his first steps towards politics, is, from a scholarly perspective, accurate, yet it is difficult to understand how “Montaigne, Herder and his Volkergeist…, Fichte,” can be seen as being among J. Evola’s “forefathers”, when strong reservations are expressed in the first chapter of Il Mito del Sangue against Fichte’s and Herder’s positions and constructions on race, and the philosophy of the half-Jewish French humanist is clearly light years away from the Italian author’s Weltanschauung. Much of what is mentioned concerning his relations to Fascism and to Fascists in the years 1935-1945 is substantiated. The account given of the Italian author’s connection with National-Socialism is not inaccurate, both on the politico-historical plane and on the intellectual plane, except it contains some nebulous formulations and it is dramatically incomplete. What a statement such as : “Evola tried to construct a racial theory that combines the history of the spirit with racial history,” may mean is not at all clear, and yet it is the conclusion reached at the end of the chapter on ‘Evola and Racism’ ; now, what he tried to do in this respect was, as laconically put by the preface writer of Sintesi di dottrina della razza (12) “to give a traditional content to a modern concept”, that is to say, to apply the concept of race to the traditional organic view of man as body, soul, and spirit.
Much has been written in the Anglo-Saxon world about the relationship between J. Evola and the National-Socialist leadership, much of which is entirely based on what is reported in the preface and introduction to Men among the Ruins, which in turn relies on documents which were published in Italian translation from the mid-1980s (13), the only available reports written by German authorities during WWII about the Italian author ; they were mainly taken from the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz and the Berlin Document Centre.
The first document is a letter, dated January 2nd 1938, from SS-Hauptsturmführer Langsdorff to Reichsführer Himmler about “the personality and the ideas of Evola” and, more particularly, about Heathen Imperialism ; the last, a short letter, dated September 1940, from J. Evola to Dr Böhm of the Ahnenerbe. However, the consideration of these documents in ‘Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors’ stops at ‘The final report on Evola’s June 1938 lectures, kept in the handwritten files of the personal staff of the Reichsführer-SS (file AR/126)’, whose notorious conclusion is highlighted : “there exist no grounds for National-Socialism to place itself at the disposal of Baron Evola. His political plans for a Romano-Germanic Imperium are of a utopian character and moreover very apt to cause ideological confusions. Since Evola is also only tolerated and barely supported by Fascism, it is tactically not necessary to accommodate his tendencies from our side. It is therefore recommended to :
1. Not support Evola’s current efforts for the establishment of a secret supra-national order and the founding of a magazine directed toward this goal.
2. Curb his public activities in Germany after this lecture series, without taking any special measures.
3. Prevent his further penetration into leading offices of the party and the state.
4. Observe his propaganda activity in neighboring countries.”
In fact, here, the very last document to be taken into account is a short letter, dated August 8, 1938, from the author of the report to H. Himmler : “The Reichsfuhrer-SS has acknowledged the report regarding the lectures of Baron Evola and is in full agreement [or rather, in agreement] with the thoughts and recommendations [or rather, the terms] stated in the last paragraph thereof.” On that basis, the inference can legitimately be drawn that “the SS as a whole was not favourably inclined toward him, even though he was apparently unaware of it” ; it will soon become clear why “he was apparently unaware of it”.
Speaking of awareness, has anyone wondered why, in 1944, following the invasion of Italy by the Anglo-Saxon cannon fodder of the anti-European forces, J. Evola moved to Austria, where, in Vienna, he was commissioned by the SS to translate Freemasonic documents seized by the Gestapo from various lodges which had just been raided by the SS, if indeed “the SS as a whole was not favorably inclined toward him” ? Miguel Serrano writes that “In Vienna it was possible for me to read an internal communication among several SS centers in which they recommended Julius Evola not be given facilities to expound ‘his esotericism’” (The Last Avatar). It is a shame that the Chilean author did not have the opportunity to access the various other documents which were published in Julius Evola nei rapporti delle SS, and which are not brought to the reader’s attention in ‘Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors’.
In a short letter, dated September 6th, 1938, to the personal staff of the Reichsführer-SS, the ‘Società Italo-Tedesca’ confirmed they had received the day before a payment of “300 Reichsmark for the stay of J. Evola in Germany” the previous June.
In March 1939, G. Landra, who later became the first director of the Office of Racial Studies and who, at that time, was a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Rome, wrote to the Reichsführer-SS,
informing him that J. Evola had drawn their attention to the “biological and racist basis of the SS led by you, as well as to the aspects that make it a caste order.”
Six weeks later or so, the SS. Obersturmbannführer Grau, in a letter to SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr. R. Brandt, H. Himmler’s personal chief of staff, reminded him that “Baron Evola, who once published a brilliant article on the SS in the Italian review La Vita Italiana, (…) after he read the speech delivered by the Reichsführer-SS… in Magdeburg, wrote another article, which is essentially based on this speech and which he would like to publish under the signature of the Reichsführer, either in La Vita Italiana, or in the review Regime Fascista. The Baron is acting under the explicit orders of Professor Landra, that is, of the Minister (of Popular Culture) Farinacci.”
Two days later, Dr. Brandt informed Grau that J. Evola’s request had been favourably considered by the Reischsführer, who, however, did not wish the article to be published under his name, and asked that a few minor changes be made to some passages “that could hurt Italian feelings”. It was published on the 15th of June of that year, in Regime Fascista, and sent to H. Himmler, who, on the 26th of July, had Standartenführer Ullmann, informed G. Landra of the following :
“The Reichsführer-SS is willing to keep supporting in the future the work of the writer Baron J. Evola. Baron J. Evola is therefore asked to make proposals on the topics he intends to tackle in the field of the activities of the SS.”
Incidentally, there is every reason to believe that, surprisingly enough, J. Evola was far more familiar with the ideas and policies of H. Himmler and the German ideologists than these were actually familiar with his work, let alone their knowledge of his precise relations with the Fascist regime. Indeed, in a review of Grundrisse der Faschistischen Rassenlehre, the German edition of Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza, sent on the 9th of September, 1942 to the head of the NSDAP Racial Policy Department, Dr Gross, Dr Huettig stated that J. Evola “was not authorised” to publish it under this title (Synthesis of the Fascist Doctrine of Race instead of Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race), when permission to do so had been given to the Italian author by B. Mussolini. This lack of first-hand information is also evidenced by another document quoted by Hansen, a document “from Himmler’s personal staff” which shows that “Himmler personally received and collected information about Evola” and “reports that Himmler again ordered a thorough examination of Evola’s Heidnischer Imperialismus, in which the German translation should even be compared to the original Italian text in order to eliminate errors in translation. (sic)” So the chief of the Sicherheitshauptamt (main security office) who was supposedly in charge of collecting information about the Italian author was not aware of what was known by any contemporary Italian-
speaking German reader interested in J. Evola’s work, that is, that Heidnischer Imperialismus was not the German translation of Imperialismo Pagano, but a different book entirely.
Some have sought to “fill in the gaps” by means of embroidery, in the tradition of sensational journalism, describing J. Evola, for example, as the “éminence grise of Mussolini”, while others beat around the bush in a conventional manner, attempting to exorcise their own senses of guilt by trying more or less to apologise, from a merely moral point of view, for Evola’s so-called “compromises” with Fascism and National Socialism. We may add that this shows some temerity, because Evola himself not only never apologised, but once stated that, if anyone needed to make excuses, it was the others, the representatives of counter-initiation and their gynaeco-democratic lackeys, whose lessons in morality a differentiated man does not need.
‘Evola’s attitude towards the Jews’, the fifth part of ‘Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors’, is also, to a greater or lesser extent, the fruit of a selective reading of the Italian author’s anti-Semitic writings and of a biased tendency to think of racism merely as hatred or intolerance of another race. It is true that “There are so many comments against the Jews in Evola’s work, ranging from simple criticisms to truly painful ones, that there can be no doubt about his basic attitude…”; rather than being “against Jews”, however, these comments are, first and foremost, about Jews. The first sentence of the following quote demonstrates a consummate sense of salami slicing which greatly distorts the Italian author’s thought : “His writings never spoke out against orthodox religious Judaism. On the contrary ; as an example, he writes in Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem : “There are elements and symbols in the Old Testament that possess metaphysical and therefore universal value.” (14) Or in (a footnote of)Revolt Against the Modern World (p. 281) : “In contrast to orthodox Judaism, early Christianity can at most claim a mystical character on the same line as the prophets… And whenever a true esotericism was subsequently created in the West, it was essentially found outside of Christianity with the help of non-Christian currents, like the Hebraic Kabbalah…”’ Indeed, the following clause, a restrictive one, was left out of the first quote: “even though they were taken from somewhere else…” The point made by J. Evola is that “even though they were taken from somewhere else, elements and symbols of metaphysical and, therefore, universal value can be found in the Old Testament. (15) As regards the second quote, for the sake of completeness, a passage of ‘La scienza ebraica, la teoria della relatività e la ‘catarsi demoniaca’’ (16) in which the Kabbalah is considered as an application to the divine world of the Semitic peoples, and, more specifically, of the Jews’ “tendency towards abstract mathematical speculation”, should have been brought to the reader’s attention, making him aware that J. Evola’s views on early Hebraism varied significantly over time with respect to the issue of Messianism : in a curious article called ‘Trasformazioni del ‘Regnum’’ (17), it is argued that “It is not the former Jewish Messianic idea, but its corruption and its materialisation, which is the real point of reference for the subversive forces which aim at destroying for good our civilisation and at exercising a satanic dominion on all forces on earth”, whereas the close connection between the early Jewish Messianic idea and the thirst for material possessions right from the start, and not just from Mosaic times, is fully recognised by the Italian author both in Il Mito del
sangue (“… the ‘Kingdom’ supposedly promised to the Jewish people was not understood by any means in a mystical and supra-terrestrial sense, but as that which is to possess all the riches of the world”) and in ‘Il Giudaismo nell’antichità’ (“It has been noted that the very way the Jews conceived of the relation between man and the divinity, a relation that was based on a mercantile mechanism of service and rewards, shows, do ut des, a mercantilism that must have already constituted the essence of Judaism in ancient times; however, this spirit could not but provoke the scorn of Aryan peoples, who were used to a different type of morality and conduct. As is known, in the ancient Law, the Torah, the Messianic idea was already intimately connected with earthly riches and goods, which would give rise to capitalistic speculation, and, finally, to economics as an instrument of power in Israel’s plans.”).
Between 1932 and September 1941, J. Evola published forty articles or so on the Jewish problem in various Italian papers, of which thirty-one, all signed ‘Arthos’, appeared in La Vita Italiana, and were compiled in 1992, by the Italian publisher Il Cinabro, into an anthology, the aforementioned Il ‘Genio’ d’Israele. It is divided into four sections, namely ‘L’Azione distruttrice’ (‘The Destructive Action’), ‘Guerra occulta e ‘Protocolli’’ (‘Occult War and the ‘Protocols’’), ‘L’Intervento nella Storia’ (‘The Intervention in History’), ‘L’Antisemitismo’ (‘Anti-Semitism’). The title is borrowed from a set of three articles published by J. Evola in La Vita Italiana in 1936 on the subject of the destructive action of Judaism : Il ‘Genio’ d’Israele, at the outset of which the organic nature of the study of Judaism which he was about to carry out in a long series of articles, “whose systematic coherence will certainly not escape the attentive readers of La Vita Italiana”, is made clear. Three-quarters of these articles, which, for most of them, stand as essays on their own, examine the Jewish problem on the cultural and scientific level in the broadest sense, while the remaining quarter looks into it, either from a spiritual and religious perspective, or from an economic, social and political perspective. Therefore, it is simply not the case that “Evola’s attacks are more often directed against the Jews as symbol of the rule of economic-materialistic individualism and the hegemony of money. In other words: in the Jews he is fighting materialism”, and that these would be limited to “… the same accusations that Martin Luther brought up, and which Karl Marx presented in his tract Zur Judenfrage (Concerning the Jewish Question), published 1844 in the Deutsche französische Jahrbücher in Paris.” Marx’s anti-Semitic arguments are of the economic order, while Luther’s are of the religious and economic order. The Jewish question was looked into “in a totalising way” by J. Evola.
Even if J. Evola had only envisaged the Jewish problem from an economic perspective, it would still be inaccurate to state that “The fact that in doing so he again brings up all the well-known prejudices and generalizations shows that he too was dependent on the preeminent Zeitgeist”. For “These accusations” had already been made by a huge number of people throughout the ages, including the citizens of the German town of Hirschau, who, in the Renaissance, “opposed allowing Jews to live there because Jews were seen as aggressive competitors who ultimately dominate the people they live among : ‘If only a few Jewish families settle here, all small shops, tanneries, hardware stores, and so on, which, as things stand, provide their proprietors with nothing but the scantiest of livelihoods, will in no time at all be
superseded and completely crushed by these [Jews] such that at least twelve local families will be reduced to beggary, and our poor relief fund, already in utter extremity, will be fully exhausted within one year. The Jews come into possession in the shortest possible time of all cash money by getting involved in every business ; they rapidly become the only possessors of money, and their Christian neighbors become their debtors.” (18) From Antisemitism Through the Ages (19) andHistory and Hate : The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism (20) to Antisemitism : A Reference Handbook (21) and Antisemitism : A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (22), countless books, essays, and articles examine the relations between Jews and non-Jews and analyse the origins and the development of intellectual and cultural anti-Semitic ideas and beliefs in Europe from Roman times to the present ; whether or not it was the Enlightenment that made possible the growth of non-religious anti-Semitism, the fact remains that anti-Semitic attitudes were prevalent among French and Russian intellectual circles as early as in the 18th century, while, drawing its inspiration from German romanticism, and, particularly, from the Jew Johann Gottfried Herder’s concept of Volk, anti-Semitic literature, in which the Jew became the incarnation of selfish and atomistic individualism and of resistance to the national, ethnic, and ethical state, flourished in the first half of the 19th century in Germany. As summed up by B. Lazare (23), “If this hostility, this repugnance had been shown towards the Jews at one time or in one country only, it would be easy to account for the local causes of this sentiment. But this race has been the object of hatred with all the nations amidst whom it ever settled.”
In an essay on the Aryan nature published in 1940 in Il Corriere Padano, J. Evola stressed that “One is born ‘Aryan’, one does not become so: NASCITUR, NON FIT. (…) To be Aryan is a quality of race and of caste. It is transmitted from father to son. Nothing can replace it : just as the privilege which, until recently, aristocratic blood had among us.” No reference is made to these lines in ‘J. Evola’s Political Endavours’, in which, on the other hand, a truncated quote from the Italian author is used to support the empty claim that “Since Evola set supreme importance on the spiritual attitude, a Jew could of course also espouse Aryan thought,” : “There, he writes verbatim : For example, can an ‘Aryan’ have a Jewish soul or inner race and vice versa ? Yes, it is possible…” This truncated quote is taken from a footnote to the antepenultimate paragraph of “‘Scienza, razza e scientismo’ [Science, Race, and Scientism], (24) a right of reply which was offered to him by the editor of La Vita Italiana, G. Preziosi, a major proponent of scientistic and biological racism, after his racial doctrine had been the subject of inflammatory attacks.
This is the paragraph in question : “A few more words should be said about the problem of selection. The problem of selection in its higher aspects is obviously closely linked to the inner race, or the expression of inner race. Once biology and similar disciplines have defined a given area, the boundaries of which cannot be crossed (4), it does not mean that, within these boundaries, everything is in order and that race manifests the same purity and nobility, even where pathological processes and hereditary taints can be ruled out. Hence the problem of inner or interracial selections, a problem which, as far as active and political racism is concerned, is at least as important as the protection from crossbreeding, or
rather is the necessary counterpart of this racism, since what is true here is also true of diseases : it is only when steps are taken to strengthen the body and to erase predispositions that the risk of infection is greatly reduced.”
This is the footnote : “Exceptions do not alter the rule, and, in this field, they can be explained scientifically, with reference to the Mendelian laws of inheritance. Can an ‘Aryan’ have, for example, a Jewish soul or inner race, or vice versa ? Yes, it is possible, and this does not contradict anything, or destroy the principle that the biological element must be used as the first criterion of discrimination. Here, a difficulty would arise only if it could be demonstrated that, in the ancestors of the type in question, down to the most remote generations, no racial mixing occurred: such a demonstration is nearly impossible. But since this cannot be demonstrated, the Aryan soul of a Jew or the Jewish soul of an Aryan could still be considered as a case of reappearance of exogenous ancestral characteristics which had remained latent, ‘recessive’… THIS WILL NOT RESULT IN THE ARYANISATION OF THE FORMER [emphasis added] or in the degradation of the latter into a Jew, but in a case by case discrimination, limited strictly to the individual and, therefore, not transmittable to offspring. It is therefore useless to raise again and again this objection to try to invalidate the theory that distinguishes the race of the body from the race of the soul.” Apart from the fact that there is no comparison between feeling and being, the spurious assumption that “Evola had surely noticed that especially in Germany some Jews felt more ‘Aryan’ than many Germans, and this was not only in intellectual circles” is wishful thinking.
While J. Evola was the first to acknowledge and to criticise constructively the racist arguments of biological and zoological order, it is ridiculous to call the evolian theory of race ‘spiritual’. This is precisely the egregious error that is made by one of the ‘knowledgeable experts’ whose self-righteous insight is used to support the views expressed on this matter in ‘J. Evola’s Political Endeavors’, in which it is however acknowledged that “Of course, Evola does not intend to totally cut off the idea of ‘race’ from its biological background”. Indeed, when R. De Felice argues that “… the ‘spiritual’ theory of races… renounced the German and German-derived confusions and tried (…) to confine racism to the plane of a cultural problem worthy of the name” (History of the Italian Jews under Fascism), not only does he disregard the positive fact that the racial question was looked into by J. Evola on all planes, and not just on the cultural one, but also his considerations are based on “a confusion that Landra wants to create in the minds of his readers, giving them to understand that only a scientist and biological racism is followed in Germany. Is this not precisely what is aimed at by those who devote themselves to a dull intellectual work of sabotage against the Axis and set people against the ‘barbarity’ and the ‘materialism’ of German racism ? Cases such as Manacorda’s, R. Carbonelli’s, Bendiscioli’s and the like are more than meaningful in that regard. But the reality is completely different, as we have said many times and we must say again. Landra acts as if he was unaware that, in Germany, as a complement and counterpart of Walther Gross and his doctors and biologists, there is Rosenberg, and besides the Rassenpolitisches Amt (the Office of Racial Policy), there is theBeauftragter besondere des Fahrers fur die gesamte Weltanschauung, which is at least as powerful. All that we mean by ‘inner race’ and
‘spiritual race’ has the closest relation with what is defined in Germany by the term ‘world view’ and, as authoritatively put by the Führer in Nuremberg, has the character of priority and of infallibility, since only the way of thinking and of behaving, as well as the world view, can be seen – according to A. Hitler – as a confirmatory proof of racial qualities. In this paper, we have commented repeatedly on the role of the ‘struggle for a world-view’ in Germany, on the determination with which it has been conducted, and on the fact that, in National-Socialism, it accounts for the truly active and creative counterpart of the purely biological and prophylactic racism, so that there is no need to repeat ourselves.” (25) J. Evola consistently stressed that “Precise considerations of ‘racism of first degree’ should… not be neglected in the creation of a new ruling class” (See ‘Race as a Builder of Leaders’) in parallel with considerations of racism of second and third degree. One of the very first authors to use truncated quotes from the writings of J. Evola on the SS to support the thesis that the SS was incapable of contemplating anything beyond “materialist racism” and that J. Evola reached the conclusion that the SS was incapable of contemplating anything beyond “materialist racism” is the Jew A. de Benoist (26), who dares say that “Himmler’s world-view was at the extreme opposite of J. Evola’s’, despite the fact that no major criticism of the Reichsführer’s views and action in the racial field can be found in any of the four articles on him published by the Italian. J. Evola pointed out that the criteria for membership in the SS were biologico-racist as well as of an ethico-spiritual nature (27), of an ethico-spiritual nature which had been defined precisely by H. Himmler himself in an article published in the same paper the year before (‘Principi per una Nuova Elite Politica-Razzista’), which was translated in all likelihood by J. Evola and which, in any case, was commented on by him in ‘Le SS, guardia e “ordine” della rivoluzione crociuncinata’. Because of the fact that the following statement by A. de Benoist is preceded and followed by quotes from J. Evola’s work, and that the inverted commas used around several groups of words in it make these look like actual quotes, any reader unfamiliar with the latter’s writings on race, and more particularly, on German racism, is led to assume that it is faithful to their spirit : “The SS were not conceived of in any way as a “men’s band”, as “an élite defined by an exclusively manly solidarity” and oriented toward “the absolute individual”; each of its members has instead to found a family as part of an hereditary line.” In fact, J. Evola wrote exactly the opposite in ‘Le SS, guardia e “ordine” della rivoluzione crociuncinata’ (1938) : “An SS man is not free to marry whomever he wants. By means of a law promulgated by Himmler in 1931, a special bureau must ensure that the woman he has chosen offers sufficient guarantees that she can have children conforming to the type and the race. On this basis, the SS viewed itself as a “Sippenorden”, that is, a “kinship order”, and it is on this anti-individualist and racial basis that it wanted to develop. The capacity to comply with this law is already a first proof of a higher order, as it shows that one is willing to subordinate feeling and passion as a purely personal fact to the supra-individual needs.” H. Himmler’s conception of the SS as a ‘Männerbund’ is reasserted inFascismo e Terzo Reich (28), in which, however, a completely different and unexpected approach to the issue of marriage in the SS is taken : “With this clause [that which stipulated that no SS man could marry whomever he wanted], racist biologism was reasserted, not unrelated with a certain trivialisation of the feminine ideal, as the ‘motherly’ aspect of woman was given special emphasis.” (29) If, from the standpoint J. Evola looks at things, marriage consent should certainly be based on higher criteria than the race of the body and hereditary health, it is hard to understand what is wrong in highlighting the “‘motherly’ aspect of woman” in a matrimonial context. Apart from this criticism, it is extremely interesting that the few pages dedicated to the SS in Fascismo e Terzo Reich are essentially descriptive,
and that, in the end, the positive role played by the SS in the Aufordnung, that is, in the ‘nordicisation’ of the German people both on the mental and on the spiritual plane, is fully acknowledged. (30)
Due recognition of the sound foundations and of the positive formative action of the SS in terms of formation of character and sensitivity, of ethics, along Nordic lines, does not mean that in the pre-WWII period J. Evola was not critical of its spiritual aspect, which, despite “the unquestionable existence of a considerable interest and of an appropriate sensitivity”, did not appear to him as being grounded in “principles worthy of the name” (31), even though it testified to attempts of the German leadership at integrating the National-Socialist world-view into a higher traditional and symbolic content, attempts which, “however, should not prompt hasty conclusions: as a matter of fact, it is not easy, in this matter, to make up one’s mind, and the harmful effects of a wrong way of thinking and of a false culture which have been characteristic of the Western man for centuries cannot be destroyed overnight.”
In concluding a review of a speech delivered by A. Hitler in Nuremberg in 1933, J. Evola had shown the same caution, stating that, even though he had examined the German chancellor’s writings as well as those of the main National-Socialist ideologists, he was not able “to see whether, in the end, the inner spirit of this revolutionary current works toward a racist particularism or to a universal idea. To overcome the internationalist collapse, to restore the qualitative values of race and of difference, not, however, so as to end in the pluralism of closed units and of ideas put in the service of material interests and empirical politics, but so as to allow the formation of a superior, ecumenical, reality, likely to unite nations in spirit, in a virile manner, without merging them in their bodies, seems to us the fundamental problem of the European future.” (32) In his last writing about this issue, it is clear that J. Evola considered that, in the end, the National-Socialist leadership was not up to the task in this regard: “in National-Socialist racism, [the] biological aspect played an important role, and, because of a ‘scientistic’ bias, they were greatly mistaken in thinking that all that was needed to bring back to life qualities that had become dormant and to resurrect almost automatically the man who would be the creator of a superior civilisation was to use prophylaxis and to erect barriers to cross-breeding and hybridism.” On the theoretical plane, however, it did not escape J. Evola’s notice that racism was far more differentiated and ‘in ordnung’ than on the practical plane : “… in the National-Socialist propaganda and legislation, the concept of race had an undetermined content and was affected by collectivistic elements, while on the other hand, even though less officially, a different orientation, a selective orientation, existed in the Third Reich. (…) Whilst generic racism was a mere expedient to strengthen nation self-consciousness (…) as not only the main anthropological divisions, but also ‘races’ as special articulations within each of these and of the white or ‘Aryan’ race itself, are considered in the modern doctrine of race, it was necessary to acknowledgment that Germany was not the expression of one pure and homogeneous racial stock, but of a mix of various ‘races’. (…) A racism of second degree thus developed. The collectivism of the Volk and of the Aryano-GermanVolksgemeinschaft to be defined, defended, and handled totalistically on the basis of the Gleichschaltung was overcome by the idea that not all the racial components of the German people had the same value and that the most qualified
element, the superior element, was the ‘Nordic’ or ‘Nordid’ one (33).” This point is categorically acknowledged by A. Hitler : “The fundamental racial elements are not only different in different districts, but there are also various elements in the single districts. Beside the Nordic type we find the East-European type, beside the Eastern there is the Dinaric, the Western type intermingling with both, and hybrids among them all. That is a grave drawback for us.” (34) Since this programmatic work was meant for the general public, it would be overstating the case to say, as did J. Evola, that “Any German was implicitly led to believe that he was eminently that ‘Aryan’ who was credited with the creation and the origin of any superior civilisation”, and that, as a result, the concept of race undergone a ‘democratisation’ in the Third Reich. “In fact, he does well to add, what serious [German] racists meant by ‘Aryan’ was a rather broad category in which the ‘German’ (and even the ‘Germanic’) represented only a special kind.” In actual fact, any German had to live with the thought that “Unfortunately the German national being is not based on a uniform racial type. The process of welding the original elements together has not gone so far as to warrant us in saying that a new race has emerged. On the contrary, the poison which has invaded the national body, especially since the Thirty Years’ War, has destroyed the uniform constitution not only of our blood but also of our national soul. The open frontiers of our native country, the association with non-German foreign elements in the territories that lie all along those frontiers, and especially the strong influx of foreign blood into the interior of the REICH itself, has prevented any complete assimilation of those various elements, because the influx has continued steadily. Out of this melting-pot no new race arose. The heterogeneous elements continue to exist side by side” (35), including, needless to say, the Jews.
Before coming to the treatment by Hakl of Evola’s views on the Jewish question, let us dwell for a moment on the critical picture which the Italian author gives of German racism. It is summed up as follows in ‘The Road of Cinabar’ : « … the German state racism… appeared as a mix between a sort of Pan-Germanic nationalist ideology and the ideas of biological science… », and, in a nutshell, as « a kind of zoological materialism. »
First, the very notion of “German state racism” is debatable. In the field of racism, no doctrinaire was ever recognised and presented as the official ideologue of the Third Reich, not even A. Rosenberg. The Third Reich did have an homogeneous racial policy, but its principles developped from the relatively heterogeneous views developped by various scientists and various raciologists, from eugenicists such as Fritz Lenz (1887 – 1976), Ernst Rüdin (1874 – 1952), and the Darwinian Alfred Ploetz (1860 – 1940) to the anthropologist HFK Günther (1891 – 1968), of whose studies J. Evola himself recognised the spiritual and ethical dimension and whose classification of European races, both in their physical and psychological characteristics, he used in ‘Il Mito del sangue’. Well, the four of them were part of the Expert Advisory Group the Interior Minister Wilhelm Fritsch established in 1933 in order to prepare the Nuremberg race laws. A eugenicist conducts biological, genetic, research, aimed at determining the most favorable conditions for the procreation of healthy persons,and, ultimately, the betterment of race, while a raciologist is dedicated to the study of human types as carriers of different hereditary
physical, mental and, ideally, spiritual characteristics. The research of eugenicists and the studies of raciologists are basically complementary. Of course, their cooperation is all the more productive as the former are aware of the non purely biological nature of the hereditary process, and the latter recognise the need for concrete practical action (prophylatic measures).
Then, precisely, there was more than one eugenicist, and more than one raciologist who acknowledged, to use the terminology of Evola, the race of the soul. Besides Günther, Rosenberg, influenced by Chamberlain’s concept of Rassenseele, defined the soul as “ race seen from the inside” and “conversely, race” as “the outward appearance of a soul “ ; Egon Eickstedt (1892 – 1965), professor and director of the Institute of anthropology and ethnology at the University of Breslau from 1931 to 1945, for whom “the physical racial form finds its equivalent in a mental racial form” (36) ; Hippius Rudolph (1906 – 1945), whose research on the psychological profile of the German population of Poznan was financed by the SS from 1942, while a professor of social and national psychology at the German University in Prague and Director Deputy of Reinhard Heydrich Foundation ; Erwin Baur (1875 – 1933), a geneticist and head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Plant Breeding research, who co-authored a bology textbook (Lebenskunde Abschlußklassen der für die höheren Lehranstalten, 1937, p 144) in which it is stated that “the human races are not only different from each other physically, but also mentally. If there were only physical differences, the racial question would be in essence meaningless » ; Fritz Lenz (1887 – 1976), who received in 1923 the first chair in eugenics in Munich, and whose position on the subject was the same: “If there were only physical differences between races, the Völkischer Beobachtung quoted him in 1934, the whole racial question would be without any essential significance ; there would be no serious racial question at all. That is precisely why research into the hereditary diferences of soul among racial differences is of such decisive importance » (37) ; for him, as for many of his colleagues, certain physical features went hand in hand with certain mental characteristics and, in general “the principles” of racial psychology” were central to racial studies” (38) ; Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss (1892 – 1974) whose “psychanthropy”, despite the fact that it was deemed incompatible with the official racial theory, or at least “non-scientific”, because of its intuitive basis, had at least one thing in common with this official theory: the typical Aryan affirmation of the unity of body and mind. The physician, geneticist and anthropologist Eugen Fischer (1874 – 1967) who praised H. F. K. Günther for his ability to combine science with poetry (39) ; from the publications of the SS it is also quite clear that their leaders’ views on race were anything but materialistic: “The Nordic racial body, one issue of Das Schwarze Korpssays, represents for us the ideal of beauty: there is nothing more natural. But this takes on its real and deep meaning only because we find in it the expression and symbol of the Nordic soul. Without this Nordic soul, the Nordic body would be nothing, but an object of study for natural sciences, as is the physical shape of any other human or animal race” (40), etc. In fact, in 1933, it had been quite some time since racial research was no longer based on anthropometry . “Although the Nordicist ideologues Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard were eagerly adopted by [National-Socialist] racist writers, [National-Socialist] Psychology was coming at race from a fundamentally different direction from the psychometric empiricism of today’s ‘race and IQ’ research and inter-war US race Psychology. While underpinned by a version of ‘Scientific Racism’, this had acquired a rather distinct character of its
own compared to the positivist empiricist Galton/Pearson variety. Nothing in current Psychology… remotely resembles the doctrines of L. Clauss, H. F. K Günther, E. R. Jaensch, G. Pfahler, B. Petermann, etc. (41). »
All this goes to show that Evola was mistaken in his overall assessment of the spirit of the mainstream racial theories in National-socialist Germany. To rectify this error is most important, in itself, but also because it has gained considerable ground in evolian literature.
A few paragraphs are devoted to J. Evola’s warning against the scapegoating of the Jew, and, this time, in strict accordance with the Italian author’s views. The longer the quotes, the more consistent with J. Evola’s thought : “A serious formulation of the Jewish problem cannot overlook that which concerns the Aryan peoples themselves: the Jew must be prevented from becoming a kind of scapegoat for everything that in reality the non Jews also have to answer for.” Since it is beyond the scope of this descriptive review of J. Evola’s writings on race to discuss the validity of this warning, let us move on to the next contentious point. It relates to J. Evola’s treatment of The Protocols of the Elder of Zion in ‘L’autenticità dei “Protocolli” provata dalla tradizione ebraica’ (42), in which, according to Hansen, “he included a mass of quotations allegedly from the Talmud and other Jewish religious writings. However, these quotes were taken not from the original writings but from second or third hand sources, such as Rohling’s Talmudjuden and Theodor Fritsch’s Handbuch der Judenfrage, whose dubious scholarship and zealous bias should have been obvious to Evola.” By scholarly standards, it should have been specified that these quotes were also taken from a far more reliable source, namely, the work of Father I.B. Prainitis – Master of Theology and Professor of the Hebrew Language at the Imperial Ecclesiastical Academy of the Roman Catholic Church in Old St. Petersburg – Talmud Unmasked, to which the Italian author devoted a whole essay : ‘I Cristiani e il Talmud’ (43), and which is not mentioned once among J. Evola’s sources on the Talmud by C. Mattogno. “Carlo Mattogno – Hansen goes on – who is probably more partial toward Evola, in a series of articles for Orion examined the aforementioned quotes allegedly stemming from old Hebrew sources, and proved that they were either falsified (though long before Evola), taken out of context, or in some cases freely invented.” In fact, C. Mattogno, who cannot read Aramaic any more than Hansen, and who, as a result, cannot check the primary sources, does not reveal anything that J. Evola did not already know, relying as he is on his own second or third hand sources. Let us go further: as is well-known, Aramaic, as any Semitic language, uses no vowels. “Imagine, A. Fomenko points out, how precise the kind of writing that consisted of nothing but consonants would be today, when the combination BLD, for instance, could mean blood, bled, build, boiled, bald, etc. (…) The vocalization aleatory quotient in ancient Hebraic and other old languages is exceptionally high. Many consonant combination may be vocalized in dozens of ways. Gesenius wrote that “it was easily understood how imperfect and unclear such writing method had been (44).” T. R Curtis also noted that “even for the priests the meaning of the scriptures remained extremely doubtful and could only be understood with the aid of the tradition and its authority” (45). Robertson Smith adds that “the scholars had no other guide but the actual text, that was often ambiguous, and oral tradition. They had no
grammatical rules to follow ; the Hebraic that they wrote in often allowed for verbal constructions that were impossible in the ancient language.” In any case, the Talmud needs to be kept in proportion, put into perspective, demystified, so as to reduce the morbid fascination it often holds for Gentiles. Even if all the Talmudic quotes produced by anti-Semites were false, be it because they were fabricated or as a result of mistranslation, Deuteronomy 7:16, 2:25, 9:3, 9:11, 11:23, 12:2-3, to name but a few, are explicit enough not to leave any doubt about the ‘feelings’ of the Jews for Gentiles and what they have in store for them. The inspiration of the Talmud is not different from that of the Torah. It extended the Law to apply specifically to Christianity.
In the last paragraphs of ‘J. Evola’s attitude toward the Jews’, scholarly self-righteousness boosted by intellectual dishonesty reaches new heights of Jesuitism. When the preface writer asserts that “Even if some things announced in the Protocols, although already easy to recognize at the time of their publication, such as Liberalism and Rationalism and the dissolution of family ties, have come to pass, there are scores of contradictions and absurdities in them that destroy their ‘authenticity’”, he shies away from the main point made by the Italian author, which is that “the problem of their ‘authenticity’ is secondary to the far more serious and essential problem of their ‘veracity’, as already emphasised by Giovanni Preziosi when he published them for the first time seventeen years ago. The serious and positive conclusion of the whole controversy which has developed since is that, even if we assume that the Protocols are not ‘authentic’ in the narrow sense, it comes to the same thing as if they were, for two capital and decisive reasons :
1) Because the facts show that they describe the real state of affairs truthfully ;
2) Because their correspondence with the governing ideas of both traditional and modern Judaism is indisputable.” (46)
“(…) the theoretical convergence between the essence of the Protocols and that of Judaism is indisputable, and we can infer that, even if the Protocols are invented, the author has written what Jews faithful to their tradition and to the deep will of Israel would have thought and written.” (47)
True, “In his preface, Evola himself described certain parts of the Protocols, especially toward the end, as ‘fantasy’”, but these parts do not invalidate in the slightest the “theoretical convergence between the essence of the Protocols and that of Judaism”. What, to J. Evola, “is fantasy” is merely Nilus’ attempt to compare “in an apocalyptic tone, the principal ideal of the Protocols to the coming of the anti-Christ (the obsession of the Slavic soul)” ; in doing so, “he simply raves.”
“A list of these contradictions [the contradictions contained, according to Hansen, in the Protocols] is presented in Pierre Charles’ Les Protocoles des sages de Sion.” (48) From the “condensed Italian version of this book (that) also appeared in Orion”, and, more particularly, from his comments on Protocol n° 21, 11 (“We shall replace the money markets by grandiose government credit institutions, the object of which will be to fix the price of industrial values in accordance with government views. These institutions will be in a position to fling upon the market five hundred millions of industrial paper in one day, or to buy up for the same amount. In this way all industrial undertakings will come into dependence upon us. You may imagine for yourselves what immense power we shall thereby secure for ourselves…” – “With what resources the state, which will not be able to take out loans and will only be able to levy moderate taxes, will carry out this wonderful task, he wonders, the Elders do not tell us. Yet this is the main thing.”), serious doubts can be cast on the expertise of this Belgian Jesuit in economic matters, and, more generally, in the tactics of the forces of anti-European subversion.
E. C. Kopff once wrote: “With the publication of ‘Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist’, English speakers can read Evola’s political views for themselves. They will find that the text, in Guido Stucco’s workman-like translation, edited by Michael Moynihan, is guarded by a double firewall (49).” Drawing on this metaphor, it would be more accurate to say that J. Evola suffered a hacking attempt.
Now, it could be objected that Evola says in Il Cammino del Cinabro that “after the second world war, (he) was to state the absurdity of stressing the ‘Jewish’ or ‘Aryan’ problem, from a higher point of view, precisely for the simple reason that the negative attitude attributed to Jews is now shown by the majority of ‘Aryans’, without the latter having the former’s excuse of a hereditary predisposition.” It is to the remaining minority that a text such as Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem is addressed. Obviously, “it would be completely absurd to take up again today similar problems on the practical plane” (ibidem). “On the practical plane”, but not on the theoretical.
“To react against one’s own racial awareness, to feel in oneself a revolt against one’s own ideas, means to prove oneself not to be in harmony with one’s race ; to think that there is something ridiculous and ‘scientifically’ untenable about the Aryan and Nordic-Aryan myth means to create an alibi for a non-Aryan and non-Nordic vocation, that cannot but be related to the substratum of a corresponding race of the body, or, at least, race of the soul, in the person in question.”