167 Mogens Pelt, “The ‘Fourth of August’ Regime in Greece,” in Costa Pinto and Kallis, eds., Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe, 200–214.
168 This estimated number includes China and Japan.
Chapter 2: Spirit and Subculture
Julius Evola and Sacralized Violence
Now that we have unearthed and attempted to reconstruct the rubble of the fascist nightmare, we can gain a better grasp on the workings of fascism and fascist ideology—how it justifies its existence and creeps within the margins of both right and left, seducing both sides with promises of a radical, revolutionary future where the opposing side would no longer exist. However, we have left a major concern untouched: the “occult” aspect of fascism that survived the war—its spiritual-sacred aspect that provided more than a passing curiosity for its leadership. The ideologies of Arthur Rosenberg, Heinrich Himmler, Julius Evola, and numerous other pseudo-intellectuals provided fascism with a kind of mystique that animated the rhetorical framework of right-left syncretism—visions of Nordic gods on earth, mythical Arctic-born superraces, archaic spiritual signs transcending both science and Judeo-Christian ethics, and cosmic spiritual oaths of samurai loyalty.
Perhaps the most influential of these elite spiritualists remaining after the war was Julius Evola. His followers were unique in that they wanted more than populism would offer; they wanted blood, sacrifice, and ultraviolence; they believed in and became a formidable cult of assassins and bombers bent on infiltrating the left and destroying its public reputation by heightening tensions and causing ever-grander spectacles of destruction and terror. According to future head of the fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI—Italian Social Movement), Giorgio Almirante, Evola could be compared to important leftist intellectuals and theorists: “[He was] our Marcuse, only better.”169 Evola had asserted as early as 1930 in his political review La Torre, “We would like a more radical Fascism, more fearless, a really absolute Fascism, made of pure force, impervious to any compromise.”170 Now he hoped to put that potential into action without Mussolini’s bungling in the way. This Fascism would renounce the tendency to base political power on a mass movement, emphasizing instead an elite of warrior-aristocrats gaining spiritual power over Europe.
After participating in the Dadaist movement as a young man, Evola attached himself to the traditionalist René Guénon, who preached a spiritual doctrine based on his readings of Arab, Buddhist, and Hindu texts. Guénon denounced the materialism of Judeo-Christian ethics, as well as the warmongering nationalism of his era, preferring instead a return to nature and a sense of inner oneness. Like Hitlerite mystic Savitri Devi, Evola agreed with Guénon that the world had sunk into a dark age, a “Kali Yuga,” due to the influence of its Judeo-Christian inheritance and the scientific faith in progress. Evola’s spiritual fascism found its first prominent publication in Ur, a syncretic mixture of radical syndicalism, anti-Semitism, anticlericalism, and the occult. Following his run with Ur, Evola joined Guénon in editing a regular section in Il Regime Fascista, the periodical of Farinacci, one of the most vicious and ruthless Blackshirt leaders and a pioneer of Fascist racism in Italy.171
As with the occultists of the turn of the twentieth century, Evola looked to the misogynist author Otto Weininger for his theory of gender. For Weininger, women did not exist outside of their recognition by men. Women manifested a kind of “zero” point symbolized by an empty womb. A society dominated by supermen could not maintain a strong female identity; instead, women represented the wilderness, the purity of nonmeaning, an inclusiveness, and a passivity. For all that men embody—nobility, violence, order, and hardness—women become the opposite: namely, a soft, spiritual vessel that men fill with meaning.172
For Evola, civilization manifested the social repression of the human spirit and particularly the male individual’s achievement of greatness. Greater than mass-based civilization, for Evola, was culture, which as he understood it could be carefully curated by elites to channel the energy of the masses toward destruction while leaving the higher echelon of spiritual warriors to play in the ashes. Evola declared himself an ardent reactionary, a counterrevolutionary utterly pessimistic about the concept of human progress. The superman Evola presented was aristocratic and sometimes anarchist. Evola embraced the egoist influence of Stirner through the idea of total freedom of the individual, aspiring to become an “absolute individual” who maintains a connection to the entire universe beyond the body. He agreed with Farinacci’s critique of Mussolini as overly moderate and looked down on Mussolini’s agreements with the Catholic Church.
According to Evolian racism, the Aryan race is the apogee of virtues like honor, fidelity, and courage. People of color could ascend to Aryanness only through spiritual and cultural practice. Nothing needed to be resisted more, in Evola’s opinion, than the notion that Aryans are equal to nonwhites: “We go from the theoretical domain to the practical one, or to ‘active racism,’ whenever we take a position before the racial components of a given nation, refusing to acknowledge to all of them the same value, the same dignity, and the same right to impart the tone and form to the whole.”173 For Evola, “active racism” meant the defense of Aryan dignity by whatever means. Resenting the notion that he would have to share the same conditions with workers and non-Italians, he wrote, “the so-called improvement of social conditions should be regarded not as good but as evil.”174
In 1937, the year before the notorious Italian racial laws, Evola wrote to the minister of popular culture that he had been engaged in a ten-year struggle “to give an anti-Semitic orientation to Fascist spirituality.”175 Although he heavily criticized Mussolini’s populism, the official Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party)’s 1938 racial laws were influenced by Evola’s ideology, and his later doctrine on race was applauded by Mussolini himself. The year Evola’s mission was accomplished, Farinacci, his cohort for Il Regime Fascista, was given a position in the Fascist Grand Council and charged with a ministerial post enforcing the racial laws.
Yet Evola would prefer to remain apart from political activism. “The activist world is also essentially a featureless and plebeian world, ruled by the demon of collectivism,” Evola wrote in 1943. “[I]t is not only the scene of triumph of what has been called ‘the ideal animal,’ but it is also a world…where action, force, strife, and even heroism and sacrifice are seen to become increasingly irrational, devoid of light, ‘elemental,’ and altogether earthly.”176 Although ultimately unavoidable for the “superman,” political activism remained, for Evola, incapable of harnessing spiritual power and bending it to the will. Only a spiritual “doctrine of awakening” could accomplish that.
“As for the doctrines of the ‘superman,’ they are based on the reinforcement of the vital energies and of the ‘I’ such as will produce invincibility and superiority to all tragedy, to all misfortune, to all human weakness, a pure force that, though it may be bent, cannot be broken, a will to power that defies men and gods.”177 According to Evola, this Aryan superman first lived in Hyperborea, the Arctic center of human origins. Then Hyperboreans fell from grace, moving slowly southward and losing their icy transcendence. The further south the Hyperborean traveled, the more ape-like he became, marking the history of the world as one of devolution into unthinking, effeminate species with little to no connection to their ancestral homeland in the Arctic. By awakening to the spiritual practices ingrained in the traditions of the Aryan mythos, humanity can reascend to superman status.
After the Allied occupation of Rome in 1943, Evola moved to Vienna, Austria, to work with the SS, where he imagined that an entire universe of superiority could be delivered out of the thin air of ancient texts and esoteric artifacts. While maintaining a sense of superiority over Mussolini’s Fascist party, Evola believed that the SS comprised the building blocks for an ideal Ordenstaat, or State of Order. Unfortunately for him, the SS work was much blander than he had hoped. Paralyzed from the waist down by a shell while taking a stroll during an Allied bombardment to test his will, Evola returned to Rome disappointed. After the war, however, Evola’s call for violence and