René Guénon est naturellement le premier nom traditionaliste à atteindre la Turquie. Le plus ancien document portant son nom remonte à 1938, dans l'intitulé d'un article de journal affirmant: «René Guénon, le philosophe français perdu depuis sept ans a finalement été retrouvé à la célèbre université Al-Azhar au Caire. Tout le monde à Paris est étonné par l’aventure étrange et curieuse du philosophe. » Cependant, cet article s'avère peu pertinent. Les œuvres intellectuelles de Guénon n'atteindront les intellectuels turcs qu'au début des années 80. Cela a commencé par la publication de petits articles dans un magazine conservateur appelé «Résurrection», appartenant à un parti islamo-conservateur qui a ensuite été fermé pour avoir refusé de participer aux élections trois fois d'affilée. À la suite de cette introduction, la traduction de ses livres a été entamé par Nabi Avcı, chroniqueur aux journaux Yeni Şafak, conseiller principal du Premier ministre Erdogan en 2003, ministre de l'Éducation nationale entre 2013-2016, puis ministre de la Culture et Tourisme jusqu'en 2017. Nous constatons déjà que des universitaires et intellectuels particulièrement bien placés ont tenté d'être les «précurseurs» du Traditionalisme en Turquie.
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René Guénon is naturally the first Traditionalist name to reach Turkey. The oldest document bearing his name dates back to 1938, in the heading of a newspaper article stating : « René Guénon, the French philosopher who was lost for seven years has been finally found at the famous Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Everyone in Paris is astonished by the philosopher’s weird and curious adventure. » However, this article proves irrevelant. The intellectual works of Guénon will only reach Turkish intellectuals at the beginning of the 80’s. It began with small articles being published on a conservative magazine called ‘Ressurection’, belonging to an islamo-conservative party that was later closed down for refusing to participate in elections thrice in a row. Following this introduction, the translation of his books were lead off by Nabi Avcı, who was a column writer at Yeni Şafak newsapapers, the chief advisor of Prime Minister Erdogan in 2003, the Minister of National Education between 2013-2016 and then the Minister of Culture and Tourism until 2017. We already notice that peculiarly high placed academicians and intellectuals have tried to be the ‘precursors’ of Traditionalism in Turkey.
An increased effort can also be noticed in introducing the school of thought to the younger generation. GZT ( the youth section of the Yeni Şafak newspaper we had pointed out earlier, a conservative daily newspaper known for its hardline support of president Erdogan, having close relations with the AKP regime and frequently accused of using excessive hate speech and anti-semitism) has written a thorough and well-researched article about Traditionalism aimed at the younger generation, and has even made a 20 minute YouTube video explaining the legacy of Guénon. This ‘youth gazette’ which, along with Yeni Şafak, belongs to Albayrak Holding, a billion-dollar conglomerate involved in telecommunication, real estate, engine production, textile and paper, has also organised a live stream with Ibrahim Kalin ( the current chief advisor of president Erdogan ) where he harshly criticised modernity and recommanded the young Turkish populations to read Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s ‘Man and Nature’. New articles about Traditionalist writers appear very frequently in youth magazines of many universities ranging from Istanbul to Erzurum. We can therefore observe that, unlike in Europe where it appears as a dissident current, Traditionalism in Turkey can be found intertwined in the ruling class, the place you would least expect it.
Let us not omit the opposition as well. The strongest opposition to Guénon came from Zübeyir Yetik ( from Erbakan’s Milli Görüş) who consecrated a whole book on critisizing Guénon’s esoteric and ‘suprareligious’ positions, called “Man’s supremacy and Guenonian esoterism”.
We can easily take notice of the growing attention towards Traditionalism, particularly with arrival of Ernst Jünger on Turkish shelves. Jünger is the most recent thinker who has entered this ongoing ‘intellectual renaissance’ and oddly enough, the first translated book was ‘Gläserne Bienen’ (Glass Bees) in 2019, followed by ‘In Stahlgewittern’ (Storms of Steel) later that year. Thus, it took 99 years for Ernst Jünger to reach a Turkish audience. We can therefore conclude that, Traditionalism is still settling and creating significant intellectual changes in different parts of the world, each in independent contexts and Turkey, is only recently but thoroughly embracing this perennial worldview.
James J. O’Meara
Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson & Other Populist Gurus
Melbourne, Australia: Manticore Press, 2020
“For me real and imagined, by the way, is just the same. Because the world is our imagination.” — Aleksandr Dugin [1] [1]
“The whole vast world is nothing more than the confused imaginations of men and women.” — Neville [2] [2]
A new book from James O’Meara is always a treat, but until that long-awaited collection of film reviews arrives, this will serve to assuage the hungry public. Astute readers here at Counter-Currents will immediately perceive that this is a new, slightly but cunningly revised edition [3] of Magick for Housewives: Essays on Alt-Gurus (Manticore, 2018). Although the title was intended as an homage to Crowley titles like Yoga for Yahoos and Yoga for Yellowbellies, I am told that the publishers found that too many potential buyers were unable to look past the thumbnail online and took it to be a work of “kitchen magic,” which is a new one on me but apparently is a real thing.
I myself miss the perky housewife of the original cover, an icon of American postwar ascendancy who not only alluded to the “ladies who lunch” that filled Neville’s audiences, [3] [4] but also connected it to the author’s End of An Era: Mad Men and the Ordeal of Civility [5] (Counter-Currents, 2017). Arguably the new cover, a moody, misty collage of the subjects, is more appropriate to the contents as a whole.
The subtitle also frees the book from any links to the late, mostly unlamented “alt-right.” Strange as it may seem to our grandchildren — or children — there was a time when anything “hip” was linked to the “alt” phenomenon; sort of like those funny haircuts in old pictures. Potential readers were left asking, along with Steve Bannon:
“But why does a guy who is that sophisticated get hooked up with Richard Spencer? [He’s] a goofball, and you can’t get in business with goofballs like that.” [4] [6]
For the new edition, the contents have been carefully revised, occasional misprints silently corrected, and an index of gurus added for the reader’s convenience.
Since all but the title essay — a synoptic look at the Hermetic tradition from Plotinus to Evola to Neville, demonstrating the author’s easy mastery of the field, which first appeared in Aristokratia IV — appeared in some form here on Counter-Currents, the high level of scholarship and presentation can be taken for granted. But what is the principle of selection for this motley crew, ranging from the infamous Crowley and the underground magic of Evola, to the misunderstood “popularizer” Alan Watts, then to modern chaos magic and Colin Wilson’s Outsider, finally back to the barely remembered midcentury phenomenon who called himself Neville? As O’Meara explains it,
In the wake of the populist revolt against globalist tyranny, and its controversial tribunes like Trump, it’s time for a look at what can now be discerned as an equally new development, on the fringes of Western civilization, among what came to be known as “popular culture,” during the so-called pre- and post-war eras: a new kind of spiritual teacher or “guru,” one more interested in methods, techniques and results than in dogmas, institutions, or — especially — followers.
In the wake of even more recent developments, what O’Meara previously styled “alt-gurus” he now calls “populist gurus.” An equally good term, if we extend our temporal limits back into the 19th century, and acknowledge how geographically American this phenomenon is, [5] [8] might be what Arthur Versluis has dubbed “American gurus,” who espouse what he calls “immediatism.”
[Immediatism is] the assertion of immediate spiritual illumination without much if any preparatory practice within a particular religious tradition. Some call this “instant enlightenment.” [Its] origins precede American Transcendentalism, [6] [9] and whose exemplars include a whole array of historical figures, right up to contemporary New Age exponents. In this line, a figure like Timothy Leary, and other erstwhile psychedelic evangelists, play a significant role because what could be more immediate than the result of taking a pill? [7] [10]
Immediatism is based, in turn, on “an underlying metaphysics” which Versluis calls “primordialism”: “We as human beings have access to blissful awareness that is not subject to temporal or spatial restriction [and] is always present to us.” [8] [11] Since it is always present, it pops up from time to time in history, only to be occulted again by mainstream dogmatism, until rediscovered once more; it endures in time not by institutions but by texts and gurus, [9] [12] and above all by techniques: from Crowley’s convoluted and obscurantist rituals and doctrines to Wilson’s “pencil trick” and, perhaps most archetypally, Neville’s “simple method to change the future”; as Neville says repeatedly, “Go home and try it tonight — prove me wrong!”
So it’s no surprise that immediatism should be so prevalent today, and especially in the United States: in the Kali Yuga, where institutions are in decay, or, as in America, they never really existed.
Immediatism is sort of the Dark Twin of Traditionalism; or rather, seeing it from our Yankee perspective, it’s the Bright Twin. To Traditionalism’s innate pessimism — “You must submit to an orthodox tradition to have even a glimmer of a change, after arduous labor, to achieve enlightenment or even a fully human life; oops, looks there aren’t any around these days, too bad, better luck in the next kalpa” — Emerson, the original American Guru, asks bluntly:
The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? [10] [13] Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. [11] [14]
This may all seem too airy-fairy, but if you want a practical application, consider, as O’Meara does here, the role played by “meme magick” in the Trump phenomenon; it can also provide the key to understanding Steve Bannon’s surprising and complex relationship with Traditionalism.
Benjamin Teitelbaum, in his War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers, devotes considerable attention to Bannon’s idiosyncratic reading of Guénon and Evola. He never discusses Bannon’s American intellectual heritage, which is a pity, since it would help explain what he calls Bannon’s “horizontal Traditionalism”: rather than bemoaning the confusion of the castes in the modern world, and futilely wishing for a “return of kings” (with oneself, of course, as a king, or at least on the general staff), Bannon tips the hierarchy on its side, and puts his faith in the ordinary working-class Joe Schmoe (Bannon calls them “serfs”) as a perennial source of traditional values to counterbalance the elite’s secular globalism. It’s basically Jeffersonian “natural aristocracy” and a political application of Emerson’s primordialism. [12] [15]
But how does Evola fit in here, with all these mystical Yankee peddlers, these Melvillian confidence men, and lightning-rod salesmen? Was Evola not the proponent of capital-T Tradition with its hierarchies and fatalism?
Indeed; but before he became the darling of alt-rightists seeking “our Marcuse, only better,” before reading a word of Guénon, he was a magician; that is, neither a dogmatic theologian or a materialistic scientist, but an esotericist. That Evola is quoted as the epigraph of the work under review:
One can expect that one day religion, as well as theology itself, will become an experimental science, certainly an upheaval, not lacking interest, that leads us back to a proper view of mystical and traditional esotericism. [13] [16]
This was the “good” Evola. The “bad” Evola arose from what Pierlo Fenili, in an eye-opening article in Politica Romana — “The Errors of Evola” — calls the “wrong choice of traditions;” as Jocelyn Godwin explicates: [14] [17]
Fenili points out that of the four protagonists who were left at the end of the Western Empire in 476, only the Roman Senate and the Eastern Empire had authentic Roman roots. The other two players were the Church, whose origin was in the Near East, and the Germanic peoples of the north, and it was with these enemies of Romanity that Evola chose to align himself.
You can buy James O’Meara’s End of an Era here [5].
From this followed another error, “alienation from the ancestral tradition.” [15] [18] The true Western Tradition was
[Carried] onward by such figures, ignored by Evola [and loathed by Guénon], as. . . Boethius. . . who worked under a Gothic emperor to preserve all he could of Greco-Latin learning; Michael Psellus. . . the Byzantine Platonist; the early Humanists from Petrarch onwards, whom Evola dismisses as merely safeguarding the “decadent forms” of Antiquity; Ficino, who continued Boethius’s project by translating the works of Hermes, Plato, and the Neoplatonists; Pico della Mirandola with his defense of the dignity of man [which Evola] censured for its “rhetorical exaltation of individuality.”
The choice is not between secular science and “Tradition” in the form of dogmatic religion. [16] [19] The true “Roman” tradition is the one that gave birth to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, the bug-bears of both Traditionalists and Neo-Reactionaries. Needless to say, this is the Platonic tradition — pro-science but anti-scientism, pro-spirituality but anti-“churchianity” — to which Emerson and the “American Gurus” belong.
And this is why Evola belongs here; Fenili insists that “the most important part of Evola’s creative oeuvre consist[s] of the works of esoteric, orientalist and philosophic character,” which include The Doctrine of Awakening, The Hermetic Tradition, and The Yoga of Power, which, together with Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus, are the works constantly cited by O’Meara to explicate and justify what he calls “America’s homegrown Hermeticism, native Neoplatonism, and two-fisted Traditionalism” — a more authentic Tradition than anything dreamed up in Guénon’s cork-lined bedroom.
Bringing these figures together illuminates a uniquely American and Modernist phenomenon, excavates a third stream — esotericism — between science and religion, and de-occultates the hidden passage from Evola’s magic to post-Trump populism.
There is another thread of continuity in the studies presented here. Starting from reminiscences of teenage years listening to early Sunday morning radio broadcasts of Alan Watts, through the dense accumulation of names and references, surfacing in the clear, easy mastery of his presentation of Neville as the greatest voice of hermetic tradition in the 20th century, we have here, intended or not, an intellectual biography, a more modest version of Evola’s Path of Cinnabar.
And so we can say, as Teitelbaum says of the Brazilian Traditionalist and populist Olavo de Carvalho:
Thinking in these terms. . . made his ostensible journey seem like no journey at all: his activities since discovering Traditionalism in the 1970s would instead appear variations on a theme rather than a dilettantish succession of gimmicks and reinventions. [17] [20]
Whitman, one of the great voices of American immediatism, comes to mind. “This is no book, cammerade [sic]. Who touches this touches a man. . .”
If you want to support our work, please send us a donation by going to our Entropy page [21] and selecting “send paid chat.” Entropy allows you to donate any amount from $3 and up. All comments will be read and discussed in the next episode of Counter-Currents Radio, which airs every Friday.
Notes
[1] [22] Quoted in Benjamin Teitelbaum, War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), p. 153
[2] [23] “Neville’s Purpose Revealed,” in Let Us Go Into the Silence: The Lectures of Neville Goddard, compiled by David Allen (Kindle, 2016)
[3] [24] Described in the title essay, “Magick for Housewives: The (Not So) New (and Really Rather Traditional) Thought of Neville Goddard.” Neville, by his own admission, was known as “The Mad Mystic of 48th Street.” The haute bourgeois ladies Tom Wolfe later called “Social X-Rays,” looking for a new thrill, would say to each other: “Oh, do come along and hear him, it’s free and he’s terribly funny!”
[4] [25] Teitelbaum, op. cit., p.267.
[5] [26] Watts were British, but Watts emigrated to the US and gained fame there, while Wilson always felt like an “outsider” in British culture and openly preferred Americans. Neville was from Barbados, emigrated to New York at seventeen, and was given citizenship after being drafted in World War Two. The outlier is Crowley, but he would be an outlier anywhere, and at least spent some time in the US.
[6] [27] Versluis traces it back to Plato, via Emerson: see American Gurus, Chapter 2, “Revivalism, Romanticism, and the Protestant Principle.” Camille Paglia also delineates a “North American Literary Tradition” that originates in the collision of American Puritanism with European Romanticism; see my review “The Native American Nietzsche: Camille Paglia, Frontier Philosopher [28].”
[7] [29] See his interview here [30].
[8] [31] American Gurus: From Transcendentalism to New Age Religion (Oxford, 2014), p 248.
[9] [32] Like Zen, a “special transmission outside the scriptures” – Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism: A History. Volume 1: India and China, World (Wisdom Books, 2005), pp. 85-94.
[10] [33] Neville: “Religious progress is a gradual transition from a god of tradition to a God of experience.” (“Control Your Inner Conversations [34],” 4-26-1971.
[11] [35] “Nature” (1844).
[12] [36] “When I was drafted, called, and sent, it was with the command, ‘Down with the bluebloods.’ In other words, down with all church protocol, with anything that would interfere with the individual’s direct access to God. There is only one foundation upon which to build. That foundation is I AM, and there is no other.” Neville, “No Other Foundation [37],” 11-04-1968.
[13] [38] Julius Evola, “The New Spirit Movement”; originally published in Bilychnis, June, 1928.
[14] [39] See Jocelyn Godwin, “Politica Romana Pro and Contra Evola,” in Arthur Versluis, Lee Irwin, and Melinda Phillips (eds.), Esotericism, Religion, and Politics (Minneapolis, MI: New Cultures Press 2012). I don’t read Italian and haven’t read the article itself, so I am relying on Godwin’s presentation.
[15] [40] Guénon, for his part, never even pretended to be “Roman” and in fact despised the Classical world, no doubt a reaction to a typical French education; after years of trying to interest the Catholic Church in his ideas, he eventually converted to Islam. Why rightists think he has anything to contribute to their struggle is a mystery.
[16] [41] Commenting on 1 Corinthians, Robert Price notes that in the “Catholic anti-wisdom section” of Chapter 3 we find “once again, the opposite of [worldly] wisdom is not esotericism but simplicity. The pious attitude is that which regrets the sampling of the knowledge tree in Eden, the erection of the Babel tower. Such a one is happy to mortgage his faith to the Grand Inquisitor.” The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2012); compare Evola’s The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995), especially the “Introduction to Part One: The Tree, the Serpent, and the Titans.”
[17] [42] Teitelbaum, op. cit., p.260.
We will surely remember 1994 better than 1984, which Orwell immortalised by writing his celebrated apocalyptic book predicting an ultra-totalitarian world in which we all would have been irredeemably crushed. We will not remember it solely for the political event of 27 March in Italy, but above all for the consequences that this “reversal” might (I insist on the conditional!) have in the cultural sphere. Whatever one may thing of the victory of Berlusconi and his allies, it has already had a first result: the organisation of a colloquium dedicated to the personality of Giovanni Gentile; it was held in Rome on 20 and 21 May 1994 on the initiative of the leftist municipal council (which does honour to the Italian left, as does the other colloquium it dedicated to Nietzsche). We remember he whom we always defined as the “philosopher of Fascism,” fifty years after his death, when he was assassinated by a commando of communist partisans in Florence on 15 April 1944. After having beaten a long and sinuous intellectual course, many post-Marxist philosophers, such as Colletti, Marramao and Cacciari, claimed him for an authentic figure of the left, at least in a decent part of his work.
En 1926 parut: « L’homme en tant que puissance ». C’est un premier essai qui, bien des fois repris, donnera en 1949 « Le yoga tantrique, sa métaphysique, ses pratiques ». Evola s’ouvre à l’Orient, en l’occurrence à la tradition hindoue, et cela est d’autant plus intéressant que l’orient d’Evola n’est pas le même que celui de Guénon, il s’agit essentiellement de doctrines émanant de la caste des ksatriyas, la caste guerrière, et par cet aspect on trouve quelque chose qui consonne remarquablement avec l’ancienne tradition occidentale: il s’agit aussi de science « magique ». Prévenons tout de suite une équivoque possible : ce qu’Evola nomme magie n’a pas grand-chose à voir avec ce que désigne le mot dans le langage courant actuel. […]
L’EPEE DE LUMIERE ET LE CHEVALIER D’OCCIDENT
LA GRANDE LIBERATION DU PRINCE SIDDHARTA
LES HOMMES AU MILIEU DES RUINES
For those seeking something like a “how to” guide for living as a Traditionalist, it is mainly the second division of the book (“In the World Where God is Dead”) that offers something, and chiefly it is to be found in Chapter Eight: “The Transcendent Dimension – ‘Life’ and ‘More than Life.’” My purpose in this essay is to piece together the miniature “survival manual” provided by Chapter Eight – some of which consists of little more than hints, conveyed in Evola’s often frustratingly opaque style. It is my view that what we find in these pages is of profound importance for anyone struggling to hold on to his sanity in the face of the decadence and dishonesty of today’s world. It is also essential reading for anyone seeking to achieve the ideal of “self-overcoming” taught by Evola – seeking, in other words, to “ride the tiger.”
Still, through this gloom one may detect exactly the position that Evola correctly attributes to Nietzsche. Like Kant, Nietzsche demands that the overman practice autonomy, that he give a law to himself. However, Kant held that our self-legislation simultaneously legislates for others: the law I give to myself is the law I would give to any other rational being. The overman, by contrast, legislates for himself only – or possibly for himself and the tiny number of men like him. If we recognize fundamental qualitative differences between human types, then we must consider the possibility that different rules apply to them. Fundamental to Kant’s position is the egalitarian assertion that people do not get to “play by their own rules” (indeed, for Kant the claim to be an exception to general rules, or to make an exception for oneself, is the marker of immorality). If we reject this egalitarianism, then it does indeed follow that certain special individuals get to play by their own rules.
As with the passions, the average man “owns” his moods: “this unhappiness is mine, it is me,” he says, in effect. The superior man learns to see his moods as if they were the weather – or, better yet, as if they were minor demons besetting him: external mischief makers, to whom he has the power to say “yes” or “no.” The superior man, upon finding that he feels unhappiness, says “ah yes, there it is again.” Immediately, seeing “his” unhappiness as other – as a habit, a pattern, a kind of passing mental cloud – he refuses identification with it. And he sets about intrepidly conquering unhappiness. He will not acquiesce to it.
If we consult the context in which the quote appears – an important section of Twilight of the Idols – Nietzsche offers us little help in understanding specifically what he means by “the distance that separates us.” But the surrounding context is a goldmine of reflections on the superior type, and it is surprising that Evola does not quote it more fully. Nietzsche remarks that “war educates for freedom” (a point on which Evola reflects at length in his Metaphysics of War), then writes:
Evola’s very long sentence about the superior man now ends with the following summation:
L’esposizione in ordine cronologico e il relativo apparato critico permettono di conoscere le riflessioni musicologiche e quelle correlate di costume di Evola, avendo come sfondo gli stravolgimenti storici, politici e di pensiero del primo Novecento. I fenomeni e le teorie musicali sono sempre analizzati in rapporto al clima culturale di cui sono espressione e l’autore non risparmia mai il suo punto di vista agendo con spirito costruttivo anche quando la critica si fa serrata. La mitologia wagneriana viene demistificata in quanto si nutre di fonti “spurie” mentre la fase aurorale del jazz viene esaltata come contributo positivo alla dissoluzione della musica ottocentesca sentimental-romantica. I ritmi dell’Europa centrale vengono contrapposti al dilagare dei balli sudamericani mentre una critica impietosa viene svolta ai danni della produzione canzonettistica di massa, che a parere di Evola annega nel luogo comune e nell’incultura. Testi specialistici si alternano a pezzi di costume e proprio in ciò consiste la gradevolezza della lettura, perché si apprezza come il filosofo romano si sappia confrontare col quotidiano ben al di là delle posizioni intellettualistiche. Il principale merito di Evola è quello di anticipare e descrivere perfettamente come dal dopoguerra in poi i paesi europei e soprattutto l’Italia si siano fatti colonizzare e travolgere da mode e arti d’oltreoceano, rinunciando in pochi anni alle loro peculiarità. Da questo punto di vista ci invita a riflettere su quanto sia prezioso e delicato compito difendere ciò che è nostro. Già nel 1952 (e figuriamoci oggi!) denuncia su La Rivolta Ideale come La stupidaggine trionfa alla Rai (pp. 109-112), con l’incipiente invasività della pubblicità (e quindi del denaro) nella televisione pubblica e, quindi, nell’inizialmente onnicomprensivo “sistema dei media”.
Publié à l’origine en hongrois fin 2012 en tant qu’anthologie des articles d’Evola sur la jeunesse et la Droite, A Handbook For Right-Wing Youth (Un manuel pour la jeunesse de Droite) est maintenant disponible grâce à Arktos en anglais. Nous espérons qu’une version française verra le jour tôt ou tard. En effet, l’influence d’Evola sur la désormais célèbre Nouvelle Droite française et tous ses héritiers (des identitaires aux militants nationalistes-révolutionnaires et traditionalistes radicaux), sans oublier le fondateur du présent site, Georges Feltin-Tracol (4), et certains contributeurs tels Daniel Cologne (5) et votre serviteur lui-même, est tout simplement énorme.
En effet, les fascismes – non pas uniquement le fascisme italien – en tant que phénomènes politiques, doivent d’être étudiés et leurs résultats longuement médités. En 1977, Georges Gondinet et Daniel Cologne se prononcent sur cette épineuse question avec leur fascicule Pour en finir avec le fascisme. Essai de critique traditionaliste-révolutionnaire (1). L’objectif de ce roboratif essai au titre provocateur consiste tout d’abord à mettre dos à dos les deux « mythologisations » du fascisme : la première positive, émanant des milieux dit d’extrême droite; la seconde provenant des ennemis du fascisme, soit le libéralisme et le marxisme. Les auteurs se posent en « héritiers partiels et lucides ». Leur critique du phénomène fasciste s’inscrit donc dans une troisième voie où dominent l’influence de la Tradition Primordiale et le recul historique.
La question du matérialisme biologique, c’est-à-dire de la race, figure parmi les sujets évoqués dans cet essai. En bon évoliens, les auteurs condamnent le racisme biologique national-socialiste et adoptent sans réelle surprise les positions de Julius Evola exprimées dans Synthèse de doctrine de la race (2). « La pureté de la race ainsi comprise résulte de l’équilibre entre les trois niveaux existentiels : l’esprit, l’âme, et le corps. Il n’y a pas de pureté raciale sans une totalité de l’être, un parfait accord entre ses traits somatiques, ses dispositions psychiques et ses tendances spirituelles (p. 24). » Les auteurs en arrivent à la conclusion que la race de l’esprit, qu’ils nomment « générisme » est « la condition sine qua non du dépassement du fascisme, du retour à un traditionalisme véritable, de l’effort vers une révolution authentique (p. 25) ». 
Footnotes:
Evola, afferma Lami: “imposta…il problema filosofico in chiave individuale, o meglio, ‘esistenziale’, e risolve il metodo filosofico nella filosofia, e quest’ultima in una sorta di fenomenologia dell’individuo” . Da tale asserzione si evincono la potenza e l’originalità, nel panorama filosofico d’allora, non solo del momento speculativo evoliano, ma del suo percorso esistenziale. Infatti, l’attraversamento che egli compie dell’attualismo gentiliano, ritenuto vertice insuperato del pensiero europeo, prende le mosse, e qui Lami coglie pienamente nel segno, da Michelstaedter, dalla sua Persuasione. Questa, nell’esegesi lamiana, si configura quale: “…piacevolissima sensazione, quel piacere morale che si persegue nell’atto della liberazione, dell’auto-redenzione dal macchinamento sociale” .
De nos jours, la « discussion » est devenue une marchandise, le produit vendable des nouvelles par câble et des revues d’opinion; il n’y a plus même le prétexte d’une « recherche de la vérité ».
Nous voyons, cependant, que la négociation ne bouge que dans une seule direction. Par exemple, supposons que j’offre 50 $ pour un produit et que le vendeur demande 100 $. Nous négocions pour 75 $. Le vendeur connaît alors ma limite. Donc la prochaine fois que nous négocions, nous commençons à 75 $ et il exige 125 $. Si, par indécision, ou si je manque de volonté pour tenir ferme, vous pouvez voir que le prix va continuer à augmenter. Ainsi, les conflits sociaux continuent d’être résolus dans un seul sens, malgré les intentions des conservateurs de maintenir le statu quo, et, en tout cas, continue à « évoluer » dans la même direction.
