The inimitable Jonathan Bowden delivered an excellent speech on Julius Evola at the most recent meeting of the London New Right. As it is somewhat lengthy, it has been broken up into seven parts for placement on YouTube.
Regardless of your religious orientation, Julius Evola is important to contemporary White Nationalism for the following reasons:
1. He is a major thinker of the postwar European New Right, and he was a significant thinker of the right during the war as well. The postwar Italian government was so terrified of his ideas that they put him on trial in 1951 on charges of attempting to revive Fascism.
2. He is one of the few ENR thinkers that has a wider audience, in particular the New-Agers who purchase his books from Inner Traditions Publishing. Any entry into a wider audience for our ideas must be examined.
3. He is a non-Christian thinker who was neither reflexively anti-Christian (hence immediately offensive to a large number of the American populace) nor faddish (see the ridiculous array of “rune books” in any big box bookstore), and yet he wrote with deep knowledge and creativity about religion, and he did so in a way that is not corrosive of ethnic or racial identity.
4. Evola’s writings on the authentic, timeless solar-Aryan Tradition and its relationship to the even deeper and older Primordial Tradition are meaningful to people who do not just discuss religion on blogs and forums, but actually practice it in their daily lives.
Click below to view the remainder of Bowden’s speech.
The term “Perennialist” definitely caught my attention. I associate “The Perennial Philosophy” with occultists, such as Ficino.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy
Of course, intellectual leftists such as Aldous Huxley have made a great many paperback sales by trading on the name.
I agree with the speaker that Evola’s comment on the Protocols (i.e. “I don’t care whether they’re a hoax”) is remarkably interesting. This “medieval” notion of “emotional truth” is something I normally exclude from my studies of occultism.
I am tremendously interested in occultism, but occult studies can lead to madness. Occultists frequently believe themselves to be demigods. To correct this tendency, I try to stress a distinction between fact and speculation.
One example of facts getting blurred in occultism has been noted at:
http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2010/06/maybe-check-is-in-mail.html
One example of “fringe research” with great attention to facts is “Project Stargate”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_stargate
Back to Evola, I like the characterization of conservatives as mostly dissatisfied with the world into which they have been born, and I am intrigued with the notion of Evola as more assertive, more confident than that. I like the notion of “an aristocrat with a past AND a future.”
This kind of work stretches the Overton window in several directions simultaneously.
Hunter,
Please revoke the posting authority given to Robert Campbell.
Evola has absolutely nothing to do with the American tradition of racialism and the continued reliance of utilizing clowns like him, Yockey, Spengler and the rest is getting embarrassing.
10 – 20 people around the world care about these people anymore. If you want your website to become irrelevant, then continue posting unimportant and inane ramblings from people who worship characters that remain marginalized.
WN’s want to read stories and articles that are germane to now, not rooted in the esoteric and fatuous imaginations of eternal bores.
Publish more of your own work and Gregory Hood’s.
Pull the plug on the Bob Campbell experiment. Please.
Wait, Hunter I’m wrong.
People who read books from Inner Traditions publishing have such incredible influence on modern politics and the communities they live and work in.
Yes… we should all embrace every writer from Inner Traditions Publishing and realize this is the key that has mobilized people across the country to question illegal immigration and support Arizona.
http://www.innertraditions.com/
Indeed, on the front page of there website, a petition that demands evidence for Alien DNA is available for readers to sign.
Yes, Bob Campbell… people who buy books from this publishing house provide a unique insight that we should care about. Alien DNA and Evola… get rid of these people immediately Hunter. Please!
Part 7 has only been viewed 157 times. It deserves to go viral!
Soren:
On your recommendation, I had the impulse to distribute Part 7. But, then I stopped.
Is it wise to try to make a mass movement out of aristocratic thinking?
I was only trying to get you to watch all seven parts, not to distribute them. If you watched the speech, my work here is done.
“Is it wise to try to make a mass movement out of aristocratic thinking?”
Not sent as a mass message, but as a fishing expedition for aristocratic souls.
Holy mackerel!
“Holy Mudhead, Mackerel! More Science High, it’s, it’s disappeared!”
Bowden is a great orator and thinker. I also enjoyed his speech on Lovecraft.
Can someone please re-post this speech, or at least give me a hint where i might find the text version or perhaps another non youtube upload?
Oh My God finds Spengler (one of the greatest thinkers and author of one of the most cogent critiques of liberalism of modernity and of nihilism of the twentieth century) to be “embarrassing”… No. What’s embarrassing is having ineffectual people with the intellectual fortitude of the average simian among us. Men like Oh My God hold us back.