Thread by @TAJackson20

Guess what? There's a family birthday on the weekend I have to celebrate, so we're doing a book chapter early.
A James Gregor's "Mussolini's Intellecutals"
CHAPTER NINE
Doctrinal Interlude: The Initiatic Racism of Julius Evola

Previously, geopolitical exigencies required the Fascists, virtually all of whom were Idealists or Catholics, to tolerate the Nazi's materialist strain of biological racism. Giovanni Gentile wasn't going to take it lying down though, and neither was a certain "superfascist."

"Wait, the 1930's? Didn't Italian dependence on Germany happen during the war?" No, because Mussolini made the most dire mistake possible: Trusting Anglos.

After being backstabbed by Perfidious Albion, (fun fact, the original "night of the Long knives" refers to this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treachery…) Italy finds that the Germany, Japan, and Austria are basically her only friends.

Speaking of Austria, I've mentioned Mussolini's pragmatism and literal irreverence before, but this is where it goes from being "Chad" to being Italy's hamartia. After this deal with the devil, there's nowhere to go but down.

"Oh hey, I don't need you losers who were always loyal and supported me now that I have new, cool friends."
This is basically the plot of a shitty teen dramedy, except history had the courage to give the protagonists what they actually deserved.

To remind you all what the issue here is, Actualism is short for "Actual Idealism," as in the philosophical definition of "Idealism." Bringing the old-school version of HBD into the tent was a direct contradiction of their metaphysics, and things turned into a clusterfuck.

(As the footnote, well, notes.)

Anyway, now that we've had 4.5 pages of background, it's time for Julius Evola to hit the scene.

(side note: calling someone "the Magic Baron" as an insult was the greatest self-own since medievals forced Jews to be bankers.)

Remember, despite Gentile's prominence, Actualism had been officially condemned by the Catholic Church on the (true) accusation that it was implicitly pantheist. A fair number of Catholics see German racism as the lesser of two evils.

Evola was an unlikely man in every sense: A hardcore Dadaist who went ultra Traditionalist, and an originally-anti-Fascist who, by a bizarre twist of fate, gets an entire chapter in a book titled "Mussolini's Intellectuals."

Literally, Gregor's been writing for more than 50 years about fascism, and even he doesn't know how the heck the latter happened.

Anyway, Evola sees the conflict between the Church and Gentile, and he comes up with an... innovative solution to the problem of Idealism.

Evola shows up and gets a job in the official publication, despite a history of anti-fascism, for no reason that historians can understand, then shit-talks everyone, and gets away with it. Maybe magic WAS involved

Also, not even Evola could break the liberal mind virus at first

What I'm getting here is that Evola was basically the same sort of person as the crazy right-wing NEETs I regularly meet on this site but, being as Twitter hadn't been invented yet, he did it in real life.

This included trolling IRL. As blasphemous it was, it was also strangely impressive.

>tfw you will never be so fucking nuts that your sheer political eccentricity is useful to totalitarian dictators.
Why even live?

Evola, of course, isn't unaware of the contempt that his fellow Italians feel for him, and he hedges his bets.

Hilariously, not only are the Italians and Germans playing the same game, but they use the exact same man to do it.

Anyway, Evola's auditioning lays it on pretty thick. It's basically Protestant fanfiction at this point.

I don't really think of this as deception on Evola's part. The fact that this needs explaining shows just how poorly we current year inhabitants understand Fascist thought.

Another reason that we can't fault Evola is that he wasn't actually attempting to be deceptive. His goal was essentially to turn Fascism and/or National Socialism into a cosmotheist (in the Jan Assman sense of the word) mystery cult.

Still, whatever reasons he had for doing it, Evola manages to hit a level of WE WUZ KANGZ that shouldn't even be possible.

Here you can see a precursor to Evola's eventual disillusionment with National Socialism as well. Nazi doctrine was very much into racial hygiene, not so much the spiritual kind.

For instance, this. We can see now why Evola was originally attracted to Gentile's Acutalism; this is essentially the same complaint that Gentile made, albeit Evola's anti-materialism was of a fundamentally different kind.

Evola's racism was, in fact, fundamentally different to basically any other type that existed at the time. After the war, the allies couldn't even convict him because of the sheer distance between the higlighted text and what normie racists actually believed.

Don't get it wrong though, he didn't hold the material body to be *entirely* irrelevant to the spiritual form.

...despite what Evola's cowardly English translators would like you to think.

To be honest, it's kind of weird that Evola is as popular as he is with the NEETsoc crowd. A lot of this seems objectionable from their perspective, unless there's something I missed along the way.

Now, after Gregor has explained at length how non-biological Evola's racism was (understandable, given that the contemporary era is so materialist it can't even imagine a different rationale) we can start to explain what the implications of racial souls were to him.

Fucking Cartesians.

(The answer, for anyone who takes the question seriously, is "read Aristotle and Aquinas so you can learn 2 hylomorphism")

I admit, I was not entirely prepared for this level of woke.

I mean, as strange as this sounds, he's entirely right about neo-Darwinian geneticists and their inability to account for mutations beyond "lol random"

The other puzzling question is how a guy so perfectly suited for being the final boss of the old "evil occultist Nazi" B-movies was never a character in one. I guess he lived long enough for slander and libel laws to discourage the libs.

Gregor all but says the same thing here, actually.

Well, they were both "zero fucks given" chads, that might've had something to do with it.

"What possible ends?" Didn't you just explain that he was PR for the Nazis?

Ah, good, you were just asking a rhetorical question.

So yes, Mussolini wasn't concerned with racial issues except pragmatically, much like he dealt with every other kind of issue.

"Cool it with the antisemitic remarks."
t. Benito Mussolini.

The Italians fought against Nazi racism in the most Italian of ways: poorly organised politics, corruption, and nepotism.

Of course, this compromising with National Socialism was all done on the preconception that the war would soon be over, that the Axis would triumph, and that the issue would be less pressing after the war.
Well, that was half-right.

Mussolini's operating theory here seems to be that crazy people have a natural affinity for each other.

Trust me, I've dealt with mental hospitals and there's a reason these people are separated except under the most controlled conditions.

Evola knew all of this, and he didn't care. Why would he? In the end, Evola got away with showing open contempt to both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, survived the Allied Invasion, and walked free after the end of the war. The man was fucking invincible.

Part of it was that he was smart enough to know that the Republic of Salo was a bad idea. It's hard to imagine anyone in their right mind thinking that Germany could still somehow win the war at this point in time.

But wait, wasn't Evola trying to get on Gentile's good side? Yes, at first, but he eventually came to understand that his "true racism" wouldn't permit it.

I want to end the chapter on this note: One of the really refreshing things about this book, and Gregor in general, is that when he does things like talking about the "tragic consequences" of "immoral racism" he's doing so from the perspective of fascism, not as a modern liberal.

Next time, we explore those tragic consequences.