FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - The Right’s Wrongs

Rant Number 452 8 August 2011

As Londoners riot this happy August, and the cops do bugger-all, the priest’s thoughts turn to the Far Right. Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom, France’s National Front, the EDF, aka English Defence League. What do they have in common? They are all right-wing, yes, but...what else? Anti-immigration? Immigrants they don’t love, sure, but that cannot be their hallmark. Probably two-thirds of the Brits share that attitude but the Brits are not far-right. Indeed, they are not far-anything. A people of moderation is what the British are. (Unlike the London rioters.) So, the Right’s hallmark is not being anti-immigrants – they are anti-Muslim immigrants. Indeed, the Right is anti-Islam, full stop.

The priest is perplexed. Because conservative Islam and the Right actually have quite a few values in common. Further, I am thinking of one the greatest far-right gurus of modernity. He died in 1974 but his name, though not quite a household one, still teems online. His ideas have inspired and still inspire people on the Right – I mean, people with brains – I fear that leaves out the EDF. In a previous avatar I personally knew that man. I am writing a book about him right now. His ideas I know well. Ideas that still shock and outrage right-thinking bourgeois folks. I tell you, my far right guru was not anti-Islam. He was an admirer of it. The European Right has missed a crucial step.

Julius Evola. Remember that name. A name that is dynamite. Ideologically explosive – and not just that...Evola was a prolific writer and a spiritual master around whom circles of far right activists and young ideologues have focussed ever since. His fame spread outside Italy. Today he has cult followers even in Russia. It helps that he was sort of maudit, accursed and barred by the Italian cultural establishment, right and left. Marxists and Catholics united in execrating the man who upheld paganism and aristocracy. For the young, intellectual fascination was heightened by bizarre rumours about him. A dark magician, as bad as Voldemort, but real. Even Mussolini, Italy’s dictator, feared Evola’s occult powers, it seems.

Julius Evola was, like the priest, born in Rome. Baron Julius, a minor aristocrat. An early book, Pagan Imperialism, raised a storm, because he proposed erasing Italy’s Christian heritage. Imperial, pre-Christian Rome was his model. A future Pope, Montini, attacked Evola in print and he had to lie low. He was, basically, a neo-pagan. Another feature that sets him apart from Wilders, EDF, Le Pen & Co.

Evola’s masterwork, Revolt against the Modern World, sets forth his complete Weltanschauung. The history of the world is not an evolution, like you have been taught to believe, but an involution. Not a progress but a regress. A descent, a degeneration from an aboriginal age of Tradition. The Hindu doctrine of humanity’s four ages helps to illustrate his scheme. Priests, warriors, merchants and serfs are severally the ruling caste of each age. Relax! Don’t take this literally. What Evola means is that the values those groups ideally embody become dominant in various epochs. Sacred, war-like, mercantile and proletarian values rise and fall, that is. But at each stage there is a struggle, a duality, an opposition between two forces, two antagonisms, two polarities. Rome and Carthage, aristocracy and plebs, Papacy and Empire, bolshevism and fascism, liberty and equality, order and subversion...etcetera. You guess which side Evola was on.

Tradition was Evola’s cause. Not fascism – he was attacked by black-shirted thugs. Not Nazism – an SS secret file dubbed him a ‘reactionary’. Not even a racist in the vulgar sense – he agreed with Trotsky on Hitler’s racism being ‘zoological materialism’.

Was the Black Baron a rabid anti-Semite? The charge is serious and he was never able to shake it off. If he was an anti-Semite, though, note that is curiously one feature that would mark him radically off from today’s rightist movements. Most of them, like Wilders, shout loudly their support for the state of Israel. Marine Le Pen, unlike her dad, is careful to heap praises on Zionism. The EDF in its demos flies the Israeli flag. Nor does Norwegian mass-slayer Breivik’s bloated manifesto pick on the Jews as the cause of all evils. Muslims are targeted, not the Jews.

Revolt against the Modern World opens with an examination of world of Tradition. Evola’s world. Metaphysics, theology, mythology, morphology, sexology and other ‘ologies’ swim in a heady brew.

But my focus is Islam. A chapter on the smaller and the greater Jihad brings that out. ‘Jihad’, not after Wilders’ paranoia, but in an appreciative sense. Evola quotes Qur’an and hadiths as formulations of heroic doctrines. Richard the Lion Heart and Saladin were not real enemies – both stood for transcendent, sacred values. Indeed, the King and the Sultan believed their warriors fallen in fighting the holy war were destined for Paradise. Huh! When did you last hear a British politician say that of the British boys fighting the Taleban, eh?

Of Islam, Evola admired its mystical tradition. Sufism, initiation into fraternities like the Mevlevis and Mecca as a spiritual centre. His own mentor, Rene Guenon, became a Muslim and lived on in Cairo as a sheikh. Evola’s letter of introduction once gave the priest access to an Egyptian tarikat...

Before Europe fragmented into quarrelling nation states, the Crusades exemplified universal and transnational principles. The Crusades’ military failures were opportunities for inner cleansing and purification from the greed and materialism that had contaminated them. Evola’s point is that a genuine idea of ‘holy’ war, as shared by Islam and medieval Christendom, rested on the key belief in a world beyond this world – the world of transcendence. That lost, war becomes something animal-like, primitive and bestial. Genocides like Hiroshima and Nagasaki were some of the results...

Far from me to suggest the Right should fly Evola’s flag. That would be impolitic. Or suicidal. Evola, like Joyce, is for elites – and extreme elites at that. His heroic outlook would not do well at the polls. But I think his insights on Islam should make rightists ponder. Who is their enemy, really?

Revd Frank Julian Gelli