Italian Fascism Today
The Julius Evola Legacy
By John Foster
Julius Evola was an odd man, even by the standards of European fascism.
The racist Italian philosopher affected a monocle, recited poetry in cabarets, and was wont to walk about during bombing raids pondering his destiny, a practice which resulted in permanent paralysis in a Soviet raid on Vienna in 1945.
Evola was also one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th-century far right. His thought, which he described in an early essay as “Ghibelline fascism,” comprised most of the elements that differentiated fascism from the conservatism that it superseded.
His take on fascism, most clearly stated in his Pagan Imperialism, stands out as peculiar against the backdrop of Italy’s fascist mainstream.
Evola’s wholesale rejection of Christianity was out of plumb with a regime that was more than happy to find a modus vivendi with the Catholic Church.
The philosopher’s fascination with Nordic racial doctrines was similarly difficult to reconcile with Benito Mussolini’s regime’s principles or with facts about Europe’s demographic history.
In a moment of far-right synergy, Evola’s book was issued in German translation in 1933 under the title Heathen Imperialism, as German has no direct equivalent of “pagan”.
As Evola noted, Armanen-Verlag’s translation was a “notably expanded, revised and even modified text, in which many fundamental ideas were phrased in such a way that they also applied to Germany”.
One of the more contentious elements of Zeev Sternhell’s interpretation of fascism (discernible in Neither Right nor Left but made explicit in The Birth of Fascist Ideology) is the attempt to distinguish fascism and Nazism.
For Sternhell, they were two different things, although they shared some common traits.
The Israeli historian argued that Nazism was a form of radical Antisemitism. While some fascists were Antisemites, he argued, Antisemitism was not an intrinsic element of fascist ideology.
In support of this, Zeev Sternhell pointed out that the rate of participation of Jews in Italian fascist politics in the 1920s was disproportionately higher than that of non-Jews.
It makes for uncomfortable reading, particularly in light of Italy’s Antisemitic racial laws, which came into effect in 1938 and expelled Jews from the ruling Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF).
Sternhell’s attempt to distinguish fascism and Nazism is certainly contentious, not least because of the large degree of family resemblance between the two movements.
The homology between the two phenomena is taken as an article of faith in popular conceptions of far-right history. In a technical sense, Zeev Sternhell was correct in making the distinction.
Still, Julius Evola’s work found resonance in Germany. His opposition to Christianity jibed with Nazis attitudes.
German fascists did attempt to reconfigure Christianity to fit their inclinations – a bizarre process described with exemplary thoroughness in Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus, which recounts the efforts of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life to de-Judaize Christianity.
But, in keeping with Italian fascism’s vanguard status, Evola got there first.
Christianity, for the Antisemitic philosopher, was a part of a larger process of “semiticisation” of European culture. That culture (or at least its healthiest element) was “Nordic” (an odd position for a person born in Rome) and “Aryan”.
According to Evola, the “Semitic wave” had been “a galvanising substance for all the other Asiatic-southern factors” whose venom had “penetrated into the structures of Rome”.
Christianity had been an essential factor in this process:
In the semiticisation of the Graeco-Roman and then the Nordic world, to be attributed to a large extent to Christianity, we have in fact the revolt of the lower layers of these races, by dominating which the Nordic-Aryans had attained their splendid civilisations.
Julius Evola was a devotee of the Roman Imperium, but he also incorporated strands of Nordic mythology and the pseudo-history of Aryanism favoured by National Socialist ideologues.
Pagan Imperialism retails for German consumption myths about the connections between Middle Eastern and South Asian ancient cultures and the legends of Ultima-Thule, the fictional Nordic home island north of the British Isles.
The Iranians speak of Airyanem-Vaêjô, located in the most extreme North, and see in it the first creation of the ‘god of the light’, the origin of their stock and also the seat of ‘brightness’ ― hvarenô ― that mystical force peculiar to the Aryan race, and above all to their divine kings; they see in it ― symbolically ― the ‘place’ where the warlike religion of Zarathustra was revealed for the first time.
Having said that, Evola clarified that race was not simply a matter of biology.
“The mistake of certain race fanatics,” Evola argued, was to “think that the reintegration of a race in its ethnic unity would mean ipso facto the rebirth of a people.”
Humans are not like horses or dogs. This biological materialism failed to comprehend the necessity of cultivating a people’s mystical soul above and beyond its inborn racial qualities.
Hierarchy was central to Julius Evola’s thinking and played out in peculiar ways. He looked forward to the resurrection of ancient warrior civilisations: individualistic, spiritual fighters ready to submit themselves to the leadership of those superior in culture and will.
Much of Evola’s critical animus is shared with right-wing intellectuals more generally. He was fanatically opposed to liberalism, materialism, and Marxism, a view he shares with both fascists and revolutionary syndicalists.
Julius Evola’s fascism was a reaction against political rationalism as much as it was a rejection of European Christianity’s humanistic values.
America’s untrammelled free-market capitalism is as much the enemy of Evola’s ideal civilisation as Bolshevism.
The civilisation that Julius Evola hoped to create (recreate) will “impose a block on the Bolshevik-American tide, not by means of words, threats, or empty proclamations, but silently, by isolating ourselves and building up an aristocracy, an elite, which preserves firmly, in the living reality of superior individuals, the values of our tradition.”
Evola’s project continues to gain traction, especially with the rehabilitation of fascism underway in Europe for the last decade.
The highly classist nature of Evola’s concerns, his commitment to hierarchy and the leadership of exceptional individuals have particular resonance for contemporary populism.
Many of the spiritual themes central to Evola’s work would appear in the work of French Nouvelle Droite philosopher Alain de Benoist, a highly influential ethnonationalist ideologue.
After the Second World War, Evola developed an impressive range of marginal concerns to add to his traditional fascist obsessions. From Buddhism to sex magic, he embraced a range of topics only obliquely connected to fascist ideology.
Yet, until he died in 1974, Julius Evola remained a true believer. The collapse of Mussolini’s regime and Hitler’s defeat never undermined his faith in fascism’s viability.
With postwar affluence a distant memory, Evola’s fantasies have again become popular with those frustrated by liberal democracy’s failure to provide economic stability.
It is unlikely fascism will ever reemerge like it did in the 1920s and 1930s. Unfortunately, fascistic ideas have never been more important to right-wing politics.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.