The Julius Evola-Steve Bannon Conspiracy

This is the funniest anti-Trump conspiracy yet:

“ROME — Those trying to divine the roots of Stephen K. Bannon’s dark and at times apocalyptic worldview have repeatedly combed over a speech that Mr. Bannon, President Trump’s ideological guru, made in 2014 to a Vatican conference, where he expounded on Islam, populism and capitalism.

But for all the examination of those remarks, a passing reference by Mr. Bannon to an esoteric Italian philosopher has gone little noticed, except perhaps by scholars and followers of the deeply taboo, Nazi-affiliated thinker, Julius Evola.

“The fact that Bannon even knows Evola is significant,” said Mark Sedgwick, a leading scholar of Traditionalists at Aarhus University in Denmark. …”

I’m familiar with Julius Evola.

If you spend any significant amount of time browsing Alt-Right websites, you are likely to come across Baron Evola. That doesn’t mean anything by itself though. I’m familiar with Abraham Lincoln. It doesn’t make me a Unionist. I’m familiar with Leon Trotsky. It doesn’t make me a communist. I’ve read everyone from Plato to John Locke to Adolf Hitler to Michel Foucault.

My friend Robert Campbell has written about Julius Evola here in the past. He’s much more familiar with Evola than I am. I wish he would start writing again because he knows so much about the subject. It would be fair to say that Robert is an Evolian and Radical Traditionalist whereas my thinking is more drawn from the Greeks and Romans and the antebellum Southern tradition.

Note: Counter-Currents and RADIX have written volumes about Julius Evola. Counter-Currents and Arktos sell his books. If you are interested in Baron Evola’s work, that’s the place to go.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
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12 Comments

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      NFL VALUES:

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      !

  1. Perhaps it would only be logical that Bannon would be likened to Evola.

    I think this because, when I think of how Trump’s criticks will compare him to historick strongmen, the only one I think relatively apt is with Benito Mussolino; the latter who, during his day, was often likened to a narcisstick megalomaniacal clown.

    Of course, such critical descriptions were wildly overblown vis-a-vis the erstwhile Italian strongman, just as they are with the new American one.

    Still, they do bear a resemblance,

    • Mussolini! Holy smokes why didn’t I think of that

      comparison? He really does favor him. The exaggerated facial expressions.The swagger. Maybe Trump does it on purpose?

      http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Wr6RQ1OrNEQ/SY_DuTuYtuI/AAAAAAAAALg/jNNlzuJoL9w/s400/mussolini+tank.jpg

      Benito really had the swagger didn’t he? Let’s hope Trump is not all swagger and no substance. He doesn’t appear to be so far. I’m not a ,”God Emperor” type, fan boy but Trump has done a lot of good stuff for us. I hope he continually pushes as we have decades worth of social and legal debris piled up that need to be swept aside or burned.

      • I agree, Sam – only Trump prefers the uniform of a Manhatten mogul!

        As to Trump doing it on purpose, I think not. He’s just being who he is!

        Have a good night.

    • Yes, it’s truly ridiculous to link Bannon to Evola. The shitlib publications have to maintain the pretense that they and their readers care about historical figures and are tuned into to history and literate. And they need to play the Nazi card. So bring up Evola, and hope some dumb right-wingers avow the association. It’s the most tenuous link you could think of, to believe Bannon cares about Evola anymore than to make a silly, trite comment about it in a speech is virtually impossible to believe.

      • It’s just a continuation from the campaign, JPS.

        If you recall, first they tried to say Trump was a racist. When that did not work they ratchetted it up to calling him Hitler. When that did not work, they said Trump was Klan. When that did not work, They said he was JP Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt avarice combined. When that did not work, they said Trump was Putin’s whippin’-boy.

        Well, nothing stuck good enough – so, it’s on to Bannon and Rosie O’Donnell…

  2. “Nazi-affiliated thinker, Julius Evola”
    Anyone who has even a faintest idea about Evola, know that he was viewed both Nazim and Fascism as Modern phenomena which is a big no-no as far as he was concerned. Yet, he is “affiliated”.
    It kind of reminds how libs smeared Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt after Iraq. I mean, some on the Right like Strauss( Greg Johnson comes to mind) some don’t (Paul Gottfried), but leftists just went after him not because of philosophical differences, but only to get back at neocons. While I sympathize with disliking neocons, such intellectual dishonesty should be anathema to any man of the Right, if we want to win anywhere.

    • ‘Anyone who has even a faintest idea about Evola, know that he was
      viewed both Nazim and Fascism as Modern phenomena which is a big no-no
      as far as he was concerned. Yet, he is “affiliated”.’

      Have you noticet, Cyrus? : the ‘affiliators’ seem to care little about the actual ‘affiliation’…

  3. No way Evola would agree with Bannon on either Christianity or Islam. See my book article: FATHER FRANK’S RANTS
    Rank Number 714 13 February 17

    DARTH VADER’S WASHINGTON AVATAR

    Darth Vader: the masked, dark villain of the Star Wars series. A cosmic bogey to scare little children. Those keen on demonising Steve Bannon, President Trump’s top strategist, scream he is Vader’s latter-day incarnation. Bit fanciful, eh? But you ain’t heard nothing yet. Might Bannon be a fan of a real, flesh-and-blood, lethal Darth Vader of the last century? An intellectual extremist, an occult magician, a Voldemort-like figure whose name is mud? I mean, shock and horror, Julius Evola! A New York Times article – ‘Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascism’ – tells it all.

    In a 2014 Skype interview Bannon did indeed mention Evola’s unmentionable name. Not as a hero of his but as someone admired by a certain Russian ideologue of Eurasianism, allegedly influential with President Putin. Bannon also unkindly termed Putin’s government ‘a kleptocracy’, a robbers’ rule, and said nothing else about Evola. Still, sheer mention of that blood-curdling ogre is enough to drive frantic the liberal media elites out to besmirch Trump and his administration.

    It is perplexing. Because Bannon could not possibly share some of Julius Evola’s key ideas. The priest knew the very man. And has recorded his memories of him in a book: ‘Julius Evola: the Sufi of Rome’. Available on Amazon Kindle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Julius-Evola-Sufi-Frank-Gelli-ebook/dp/B0082BSGFU.

    JE, like me, grew up in Rome. As Baron Julius, a minor aristocrat. An early work, ‘Pagan Imperialism’, raised a storm because he proposed to reverse Italy’s Catholic heritage. The pre-Christian Roman Empire of the Caesars was his model. Future Pope Paul VI – G.B. Montini – attacked Evola in print and so he had to lie low. The point is, the Baron was basically a neo-pagan. A feature irreconcilable with Bannon’s boasted Judeo-Christian philosophy.

    Evola’s magnum opus, ‘Revolt against the Modern World’, sets forth his world outlook. The history of humanity is not an evolution, as many believe, but an involution. Not a progress but a regress. A descent, a fall, a degenerating from an aboriginal Golden Age. The Hindu Arian doctrine of the four ages of man exemplifies it. Priests, warriors, merchants and serfs are severally the ruling caste of each age. But no need to take it literally. Evola meant that the values typical of each group become dominant in different epochs. Sacred, war-like, capitalist and proletarian values rise, clash and fall. At each stage there is a duality, a struggle between opposing forces. Like Rome and Carthage, nobility and plebs, Papacy and Empire, liberty and equality, bolshevism and fascism, order and subversion. You can guess which side JE was on.

    Tradition was JE’s cause, not fascism. Black-shirted hotheads once tried to beat him up as a posh, elitist monarchist, mocking him as effete. An SS secret file dubbed him ‘a reactionary’. He wasn’t even a racist (though he penned a bizarre ‘Synthesis of Racial Doctrine’) in the vulgar sense. If race means anything in his works it is in terms of spiritual types or categories, not biological ones. He quoted approvingly Trotsky’s jibe at Nazi racism as ‘zoological materialism’.

    If Steve Bannon has struggled through Evola’s ‘Revolt’ I wonder what he makes of passages touching upon Islam. The smaller and the greater Jihad. He quotes Qur’an and prophetic sayings in an appreciative sense, as esoteric formulations of heroic doctrines. Thus, you discover that King Richard the Lion Heart and Sultan Saladin fought each other but they were still not real enemies. Because both stood for transcendent, genuine spiritual values. The Christian and the Muslim alike believed their warriors fallen in the holy war were bound for Paradise. A view unlikely to be shared by Steve Bannon, Kim Wilders and Marina Le Pen, I guess.

    JE warmly praised Islamic mysticism, I can vouchsafe. Sufis, initiations into fraternities like the Turkish Mevlevis and the Moroccan Bouchichia he highly valued. His own friend a former mentor, Rene’ Guenon, had embraced the faith of the Crescent and settled in Cairo as a sheikh. Evola gave me a personal letter of introduction to members of an Egyptian tarikat, when from Italy I first travelled to that country.

    Evola’s sympathy for Sufi mystics does not mean he condemned fighting for the sake of religion. Far from it. Before Europe fragmented into quarrelling nation states, the Crusades exemplified universal and transnational principles. Even their military failures were opportunities for inner cleansing and purification from the greed and materialism that had contaminated their soldiers. An authentic military undertaking for the sake of transcendence, as common to the Cross and the Crescent, war rested on a firm belief in a world beyond this world. That transcendence lost or forgotten, fighting becomes something primitive and bestial. Wars of total extermination, genocides like Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the result.

    JE’s literary output is large. ‘The Mystery of the Graal’ explores the Arthurian legend. Predictably (and wrongly), he denies its Christian strands. In ‘Riding the Tiger’, he suggests a spiritual strategy for radical traditionalists in this age of dissolution. In ‘Lo Yoga della Potenza’, he shows how yoga techniques can raise the practitioner to quasi-immortality. A favourite of mine is ‘Metaphysics of Sex’. Phrases like ‘magical coitus’ will puzzle readers. A man will share a woman’s bed for months, always desiring her but ‘without having any physical contact with her’. No hint what the lady might feel about such magical techniques…

    My take on JE is that he plotted to bring together East and West – on the mystical level. I wonder whether Mr Steve Bannon, aka Darth Vader, would approve of that.

    Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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