Favorite thinker of the radical right: Who is Julius Evola?

Considering Evola's intense intellectual influence on today's radical right and neo-fascist currents, these claims must be accepted as having a lot of truth.

Evola was the leading thinker of Traditionalism along with René Guénon. When the Second World War began, Guénon left Europe and settled in Egypt, where he became attached to Sufism and played an important role in spreading this belief in the West and gathering supporters. His name was associated with Islam and Sufism.

Evola, on the other hand, became one of the intellectual resources that fed the radical right. In fact, he had never been a member of the fascist party. After the war, it had no organizational ties to the secret fascist movements. Despite this, he was sued several times for trying to revive fascism in his writings. Evola was the usual suspect whenever there was little sign of a revival in the fascist movement. Half-bedded in the 1970s, the Traditionalist thinker was frequently visited by the leaders of the neofascist movement in his apartment in Rome, where he had to live in a wheelchair until his death.

Giulio Cesare Andrea "Julius" Evola (19 May 1898 – 11 June 1974) was an Italian philosopher, poet, painter, esotericist, and radical-right ideologue. Evola regarded his perspectives and spiritual values as aristocratic, masculine, traditionalist, heroic and defiantly reactionary. An eccentric thinker in Fascist Italy, he also had ties to Nazi Germany; in the postwar era, he was known as a guru of the Italian radical right.

Because of his anti-democracy and advocacy of authoritarianism, radical right movements in Europe still count him among their spiritual leaders. Evola's books were found during the searches conducted in the homes of the members of the neofascist organization, which planted a bomb in the train station in Bologna in 1980 and killed eighty-five people, and it was determined that those who carried out the terrorist act were Evola readers. But his thoughts are mainly discussed and analyzed among the intellectuals of the radical right. He has a significant influence on Alain de Benoist, one of the important intellectuals of the radical right in Europe.

In fact, the influence of the Italian Traditionalist thinker extends far beyond Europe. The intellectual figures of the alternative right (alt.right), who became visible and raised their voices during Trump's presidency and resisted after Trump's loss of the presidency, also had a special interest in Evola. Steve Barron, Trump's ideologue and chief strategist, is one of them. Barron spoke highly of the Traditionalist thinker who was famous for his esoteric and dark thoughts.

Alexander Dugin, the number one theorist of the Neo-Eurasianism movement, which is essentially an attempt to adapt the imperial policies of Tsarist Russia to the present, is among the radical rightists who feed on Evola's thoughts.

Dugin had contacted and joined the Yuzhinski organization, which opposed the Soviet regime, in his youth. Traditionalist thinkers attracted attention in this circle, which was actually the underground organization of intellectuals opposing the Soviet regime, seeking an alternative to materialist philosophy. In other words, they found what they were looking for in the esoteric ideas of Traditionalism, Guenon, and Evola.

Baron Julius Evola, who received such global attention from radical right movements and is considered among the spiritual leaders, was born in 1898 to a Sicilian noble family. He rebelled against Catholic education at an early age. His relationship with Christianity was complex and problematic throughout his life. His view of Christianity had an aspect reminiscent of Nietzsche. He distanced himself from this belief because it created masses that were weak, without willpower, and incapable of struggle.

Evola, who was interested in Dadaism at the end of the First Great War, gave performances in a venue similar to Cabaret Voltaire that opened in Rome. When he expressed his anti-Semitic feelings and thoughts and insulted Tristan Tzara for being a communist and Jewish, his relations with this circle were severed.

Evola's hatred of Jews was pathological. He wrote the foreword to the 1938 Italian edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose pages were hateful to the Jews. He claimed that the book articulated the "occult war plan" of the Jews, aimed at overthrowing Europe's aristocratic traditions and the social hierarchies stemming from these traditions. In his speeches, he put forward so-called evidence from this book full of lies, claiming that the Jews were the number one perpetrators of the world revolution and that they had brought Western civilization to the point of collapse.

Evola gave lectures to the National Socialists in Berlin in the late 1930s, which they followed with enthusiasm. He stressed the necessity of a traditionalist counter-revolution that would find its inspiration and source in the ancient Aryan spirit. Jews, communists and masons should have been the target of this revolution. He defended the values ​​of aristocratic old Europe. According to him, these values ​​were the aim of the revolution. In order to prevent the revolution, he proposed an alliance and cultural exchange between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany against the destructive, dark forces of Bolshevism and Judaism. The views he advocated were essentially eclectic ideas that tried to legitimize the imperialist aggression and militarism of the Axis Powers.

There was also a section in the National Socialist German Workers Party that opposed Evola's views, and they prevented the continuation of the conferences; because he approached the problem of the race on a spiritual rather than a biological basis. Moreover, he favored the individual over the mass, above the mass. This attitude of the Nazis, who had built their entire ideology on the people (Volk), was also contradictory.

In his Revolt against the Modern World, first published in 1934, Evola argued that the West, the cradle of contemporary civilization, was inexorably collapsing and drifting into darkness. The main reason for this was the break with tradition and modernization, which is essentially a "disease".

For Evola, the great metaphysical contradiction and opposition of the twentieth century were between two different people. One is the traditional human being, the other is the modern person who breaks with tradition and worships the understanding of the progress. The Italian thinker claimed that this second person was dragged into darkness, and he saw the idea of ​​development and the understanding of the progress that it brought with it as "nonsense and superstition".