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We are
proud to present the first translation ever of 'Tre Aspetti del Problema
Ebraico', Evola's very first work on the problem of race, into English (1). As
a matter of fact, it is the first translation of a racial work by Evola into
English. Outside
Italy, and not solely by the Anglo-Saxon public, Evola is considered above all
as a metaphysician, a philosopher, a traditional thinker, an esotericist, for
famous works such as 'Rivolta Contro il Mondo Moderno', 'Cavalcare la Tigre',
'Gli Uomini e le Rovine', 'La Dottrina del Risveglio' and 'Introduzione alla
Magia', all translated into most of the major Indo-European languages. In
Italy, on the other hand, and to quote Evola himself in what may be called, for
lack of a better word, his autobiography, 'Il Cammino del Cinabro'
(Scheiwiller, Milan, 1963) ('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. Evola's
racial writing stretches 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 paper Vita Nuova (from
1927) and with Giovani Preziosi's paper La Vita Italiana (from 1931), and, as
early as 1928, Il Lavoro d'Italia published an article by him in which, while
refuting the Darwinian evolutionist theory, he denied beforehand all the
solutions that Rosenberg was to propose to the problem of race for his own
country two years later in 'The Myth of the XXth Century'. Evola's interest in
the problem of race can even be detected in some of the articles he wrote for
the ' Evola
wrote four books on the problem of race, whose titles are all explicit; 'Tre
Aspetti del Problema Ebraico' (Mediterranee, Roma, 1936 ; Ar, Padova, 1978,
1994) is the first of them ; 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 paper called Corporatismo
Fascisto ; there followed in 1937 'Il Mito del Sangue' ('The Myth of Blood'), a
work commissioned by the publisher Hoepli ('revised and expanded', again by
Hoepli, in 1942, with thirty pages or so more ; Ar Padova, 1978 ; SeaR,
Borzano, 1995). Subsequently, Evola was asked to write the preface of the
second Italian edition of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion', published by
Giovani Preziosi in 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, also an
anti-Jewish campaign through this paper. 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 Evola's first organic work on the problem of race: 'Sintesi di
Dottrina della Razza', which was published in 1941, again by Hoepli (Ar,
Padova, 1978, 1994) ; finally, the same year, a collective lampoon, 'Gli Ebrei
Hanno Voluto la Guerra' ('The Jews Wanted War'), to which Evola contributed a
text called 'La Civilta Occidentale e l'Intelligenza Ebraica' ('The Western
Civilisation and Jewish Intelligence') appeared, as did 'Indirizzi per una
Educazione Razziale' (Conte, Napoli, 1941 ; Ar, Padova, 1994). Before going any
further, we would like to emphasise that the term 'racism' in 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 Evola to call the German edition 'Grundrisse der Faschistischen
Rassenlehre' (E. Runge, Berlin, 1943) ('Synthesis of Fascist Racial Doctrine'),
and, therefore, to present Evola's formulations as official Fascist positions,
but also he 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
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 Evola met at that
time, along with Rosenberg. Further developments in this area were thwarted,
mainly, according to 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 periodical (both in German and in Italian) publication meant to
overcome the biological materialist reductionism linked with the Darwinian
evolutionist theory : Sangue e Spirito (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 Modern
forms of the theory of race, be they based on history, philology, biology,
philosophy, anthropology or religion, were, as 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 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 also in some Western philosophical
schools, until Kant. But in the development of Western culture a shifting of
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 more and more 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 more and more 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 a knowledge of '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 XIXth
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" ('Il Mito del
Sangue'). In 'Il
Mito del Sangue', 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 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,
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, 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 In the
same way, the doctrine of race conceived by 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 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 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 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 'intraracial 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 elite, 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
elite 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 elite Evola sees as an institutionalised one, as an Order. 'Indirizzi
per una Educazione Razziale', 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, 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 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, 'Indirizzi per una Educazione Razziale' 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 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 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 Evola brings a clear, straightforward, uncompromising answer
in 'Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem', a work that condenses most of the
considerations set out by him in fifty articles or so published, from 1936 to 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" ('Sulla Genesi dell'Ebraismo come Forza Distruttrice', La
Vita Italiana, 1941 - 'On the Genesis of Judaism as a Destructive Force'). 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 In
addition to this there is the dualism between body and soul, a distinctive
feature of the Jew, whether secularized or not - a dualism that, as
the preface writer
of 'Il 'Genio d'Israele'' remarks, 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 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 on them, 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. Such
were the premises assumed by Evola to analyse the undeniable Jewish problem in
the larger context of racial thought in the 30's 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
Evola, not to mention the fact that the war declared on 24 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 war and, even more, its
outcome were to frustrate any solution of the Jewish problem. 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 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, on 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-WW2
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 more or less to 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, but not
without stressing that Evola not only never apologised - why apologise when one
has not made any mistake ? - but once stated that, if anyone has to apologise,
it is the others, whose lessons in morality a differentiated man does not need.
Let us not dwell either on the critical
comments against the so-called 'enthusiasm' that he supposedly showed in using
the word ‘Aryan’, which is 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
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 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 ‘Gli uomini e le rovine’ by H.T. Hansen
(http://www.juliusevola.com/site/MenAmongtheRuins.pdf). Much of what is stated
in it about the decisive influences on 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 position 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 in it about 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 clear at all, 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' (1994, 2d ed.), “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 relations between J. Evola and
National-Socialist leadership, much of which is entirely based on what is
reported about these 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-1980’s (‘Julius Evola nei documenti segreti del Terzo Reich’, 1986,
‘Julius Evola nei documenti segreti del Ahnenerbe’, Fondazione Julius Evola,
1997, and ‘Julius Evola nei rapporti delle S.S.’, Fondazione Julius Evola,
2000), the only available reports written by German authorities during WW2
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 2 1938, from SS-Hauptsturmführer
Langsdorff to Reichsführer Himmler about “the personality and the ideas of
Evola“ and, more particularly, about ‘Heidnischer Imperialismus’ ; the last, a
short letter, dated September 1940, from J. Evola to Dr Böhm from 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 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 favorably 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” ? “In Vienna it was possible for” M. Serrano “to read an internal
communication among several SS centers in which they recommended Julius Evola
not be given facilities to expound ‘his esotericism’” (The Ultimate Avatar). It’s
a shame that the Chilean author did not have the opportunity to have access to
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 Endeavours’. In a
short letter, dated In
March 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 Italians’ feelings”. It was published on
June 15 of that year, in ‘Regime Fascista’, and sent to H. Himmler, who, on
July 26, had Standartenführer Ullmann, informed G. Landra of the following : “The
Reichsführer-SS is willing to keep supporting in the future the work of writer
of Baron J. Evola. Baron J. Evola is therefore asked to make proposals on the
topics he intends to tackle in the field of activities of the SS.” Incidentally,
there is every reason to believe that, surprisingly enough, J. Evola was far
more familiar with H. Himmler’s and German ideologists’ ideas and policies 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’ (‘Synthesis of Fascist Racial Doctrine’), the
German edition of ‘Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza’ (‘Synthesis of Racial
Doctrine’), sent on September 9, 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 Fascist Racial Doctrine’ instead of
‘Synthesis of Racial Doctrine), 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. ‘Evola’s
attitude towards the Jews’, the fifth part of ‘Julius Evola’s Political
Endeavours’, 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 distorts greatly the
Italian author’s thought : “His writings never spoke out against orthodox
religious Judaism. On the contrary ; as an example, he writes in his Tre
aspetti Between
1932 and September 1941, Julius 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’ (`Israel’s
‘Genius’’), 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 Even if
J. Evola had only envisaged the Jewish problem from an economic perspective, it
would still not 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.” (in http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/UnderstandJI-1.htm)
From ‘Antisemitism Through the Ages’ (Almog, S., Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988)
and ‘History and Hate : The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism’ (Berger, D.,
Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997) to ‘Antisemitism : A Reference
Handbook’ (Chanes, J. A., Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004) and ‘Antisemitism
: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution’ (Levy, R.S., Santa
Barbara, CA : ABC-CLIO, 2005), 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 XVIIIth 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
XIXth century in Germany. As summed up by B. Lazare (‘Antisemitism : Its
History and Causes’, 1894), “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 This is
the antepenultimate paragraph : “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 that flourished in
National-Socialist Germany, it is ridiculous to reduce the whole of
National-Socialist racism to these, so as to suggest that there was a binary
opposition between the nature and content of National-Socialist racism and J.
Evola’s, which, as to it, would be ‘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 he disregards 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 the Beauftragter 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 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.” (‘Scienza, razza e scientismo’) J.
Evola consistently stressed that “Precise considerations of ‘racism of first
degree’ should… not be neglected in the creation of a new ruling class”
(http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id7.html) 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
(‘Julius Evola, Réactionnaire radical et metaphysician engagé’
(http://www.scribd.com/doc/56441759/Julius-Evola-Alain-de-Benoist), who dares
say that H. “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 published by the Italian
author on him. J. Evola pointed out that the criteria for membership in the SS
were biologico-racist as well as of an ethico-spiritual nature (‘L’Animatore
delle SS e il Problema delle Nuove Elette’, Regime Fascista, December 17 1940),
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) : “ A SS man is not free to marry whomever he wants. By means of a law
promulgated by Himmler in 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-WW2 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” (ibid.), 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 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 manly unite nations in spirit without merging
them in their bodies, seems to us the fundamental problem of the European
future.” (Osservazioni critiche sul “razzismo” Nazionalsocialista, La Vita
italiana, November 1933) In his last writing about this usse, 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-German Volksgemeinschaft 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.” (‘Fascismo e Terzo Reich’, p. 204) 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.” (Mein Kampf, p. 328 -
http://www.greatwar.nl/books/meinkampf/meinkampf.pdf) 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”
(Mein Kampf, p. 328), including, needless to say, the Jews. 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” (Edizioni di Ar, Padova 1971, p. 183-204), 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, 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’
(http://www.talmudunmasked.com/), to which the Italian author devoted a whole
essay : `I Cristiani e il Talmud’ (Biblioteca della ‘Difesa della razza’,
Roma-Milano, 1939-XVII, p. 247), 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
(http://andreacarancini.blogspot.com/2010/05/evola-e-la-veridicita-dei-protocolli.html
- Note of the Editor) 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 more than Hansen or us can, 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” (quoted in [765]). 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”
(quoted in [765], p. 155). 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 a few, are explicit
enough not to leave any doubt about the ‘feelings’ of the Jews for him and what
they have in store for him. 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, reach 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 Giovani 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." (http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id68.html) “(…)
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." (ibid.) 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’ (Paris-Tournai, 1938)”. From the “condensed Italian version of this book
(that) also appeared in Orion” at
http://andreacarancini.blogspot.com/2010/05/lo-storico-opuscolo-di-pierre-charles.html/,
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.” (http://www.toqonline.com/blog/julius-evola-on-tradition/). 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". BK (1) A
Hungarian translation of 'Tre Aspetti del Problemaebraico' (Azsidókérdésrôl)
was published in three parts in (2)
'Cammino" means 'walk', 'path' or 'way' in English, 'walk' in a sense of
'journey, the act of traveling from one place to another', 'path' in a sense of
'line or route along which someone travels', 'way' in a sense of 'itinerary,
direction, journey', all of which, used figuratively, are able to assume a
spiritual meaning. 'Il Cammino del Cinabro' could thus be translated either as
'The Path of Cinnabar' or as 'The Way of Cinnabar' or as 'The Road of
Cinnabar'. It is the latter that we have chosen, for the following reason,
which we see as decisive. In the entire work of Evola, when it comes to
designating a spiritual behaviour, a series of spiritual acts turned towards an
end and considered as a way that one wants to follow, that is to say, a path in
the spiritual sense of the term, Evola always uses the Italian term 'via',
rightly translated as 'way' or 'path'. The translators do this, for example,
in 'The Doctrine of
Awakening' or in 'The Yoga of Power' ' ; i.e. 'the path of the right hand' ('La
via della mano destra'), 'The path of the left hand' ('La via della mano
sinistra'), 'the Buddhist path' ('la via buddista') and so on. The term
'cammino' is never used by him in such a context. Besides, the fact is that,
while 'the path of the right hand' and 'the path of the left hand' are
traditional terms for given spiritual paths, there is no such term as 'cammino While
we are at it, we would like to draw people's attention to the fact that there
are two different editions of 'Il Cammino del Cinabro'. The first edition dates
from 1963 (Scheiwiller). The second edition, enlarged, from 1972, still by
Scheiwiller. The French edition of it, 'Le Chemin du Cinabre' (Arche Milano,
1982), appears to be based on the second edition. Copyright © 2003 Thompkins & Cariou |
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