Julius Evola- The Sufi of Rome

by Frank Gelli

  ‘Ataturk should have studied Freud. He might then have divined that his people, like the Hebrews of old with Moses, will one day reject their “father of the Turks” (Ataturk means exactly that). What is repressed invariably returns. But the true father of the Turkish nation is Islam. Muhammad, if you like. Never mind how repressed such heritage may be in today’s secular Turkey, within your lifetime things will change radically. Remember what I am telling you. It will be so.’

  Many years later, living in Turkey, I recalled the Baron’s words. He was right. Signs of the Ataturk cult were everywhere. They still linger. Ankara, Ataturk’s chosen capital, is filled with the dictator’s portraits and posters. His huge face stares at you, gaunt, Dracula-like, from too many buildings. And the fascist-style edifices speak volumes about the man’s megalomania, his personality cult. But now at last, under the Justice and Development Party of PM Erdogan, the whole thing is beginning to unravel. The repressed is back. I occasionally imagine Evola by my side, watching and saying: ‘I told you so.’

  CHILDREN OF ZION

  It was 1967. I mentioned a meeting I had attended in downtown Rome. Zionist supporters of Israel had heckled a pro-Arab Communist speaker, Senator Terracini, himself Jewish. Terracini had countered: “If you are so keen on Israel, why don’t you go there?” Terracini had been in the anti-fascist Resistance, a partisan and you would have expected Evola to say something contemptuous but he did not. He nodded, pensively:

  ‘He was not wrong. Fair point. As they now have their own state, it would make sense if most Jews went to live there. Especially the more vociferous Zionists. But that is not going to happen. Life in Israel is tough. Only the idealist Jews will leave a comfortable life in the West to settle in Eretz Israel, the land of Israel...You know, Stalin set aside a land for the Jews in the Soviet Union. It is called Birobijan. In Siberia, near China. The idea was to provide a national homeland for Soviet Jews, so that they should not feel foreign or alienated. Also, Stalin meant to scotch Zionist plans. Even Communist Jews felt a certain attraction for the Zionist ideal. Call it romantic, why not? Stalin wanted to provide an alternative at home. Well, what happened? Very few Soviet Jews went to live there. Only a miniscule minority of Jews in a state intended for the Jews. The reverse of the situation in the state of Israel today. To be fair, can you blame the Jews? The Siberian steppe is not everybody’s cup of tea...It was a kind of second-rate, poor man’s Israel. But the Jews did not buy it, naturally. It is the same with Israel. Despite Zionist rhetoric, most Jews shun Israel. Life amongst the Goyyim is more congenial...’

  ‘Otto Weininger, himself born a Jew, passes for an anti-Semite but anyone who has read Sex and Character – I am responsible for translating the Italian edition – knows better. By “Judaism” Weininger makes it clear that he does not mean a race or a people, or even a religion, but a mental attitude, a psychological tendency potentially inherent in all races. And he points out that the most rabid anti-Semites are often people who are themselves of Jewish origins. Torquemada, the terrible Spanish Inquisitor, was one. Then there was that chief rabbi of Burgos who accepted baptism and was made the bishop of Burgos. He became a Jew-baiter. Good career move, you might say! Their religious fanaticism mirrored that of the ancient Hebrews, if the Old Testament is to be believed. By contrast, the noblest Gentiles tend to be sympathetic to the Jews. Thus Weininger argues psychologically: we dislike the most in other people the negative characteristics we deep down realise we ourselves possess. A resistible argument. But, interpret it the way you like, it certainly shows that it is wrong to tarnish Weininger as an anti-Semite in the crude sense in which Hitler or Streicher were.’

  Once Adriano had recalled the Eichmann trial which had ended with the sentencing of the former SS colonel to death. After the war Eichmann, involved in the extermination of many innocent Jews, had escaped to Argentina and settled there under an assumed name. Until the day when a team of Mossad agents kidnapped him and took him to Israel. Amongst other things, Evola said, sarcastically: ‘I wonder what would happen if, say, Moshe Dayan was seized by Palestinians and tried as a war criminal in some Arab country? There have been quite a few atrocities committed against Arabs by Zionist terrorists...the trial of people like Dayan would ruffle a few feathers in the West...I won’t happen, of course, but no reason why it shouldn’t. Why have double standards? If it is a matter of power, of who is boss, well, why not admit it? That is the problem with Western democracies. They always have their mouths full with proclamations of rights and freedom and all that but when it comes to the crunch, sheer force, hard power rules. At least the Russians make no such pretence...’

  The Baron puzzled me. Yes, I had read his books, I knew, or I thought I knew, his arguments. But they did not square with my feelings, my own experience. I had had a Jewish girl friend, Paola. I also knew some Jewish lads, one of whom, Giuseppe, I was especially fond of. He lived next to the main Rome synagogue. (I learnt from him that the Jews of Rome call their synagogue ‘the Temple’.) Above all, while I was doing my national service in the Italian Army, the boy assigned to the bunk above me was Isacco. Slender and curly-headed. Thick glasses lent him an intellectual look. We had long night chats. And he was handsome. There were no girls around, so my unfulfilled libido turned towards him. Isacco and I became inseparable. He told me about his people, about being a Jew, but I did not much care about that in those days. The little menorah he wore round his pale, delicate neck meant nothing to me. Only later I learnt that it is a symbol of Judaism. Whenever I see it now, I think of the boy who once was my friend. So, I found it difficult to dislike the people which counted among them Paola, Giuseppe and Isacco. Yet, I would be a liar if I pretended that the anti-Judaic mythologies plugged by Ordine Nuovo had made no impression on me. It took me time to see through them. Also, to comprehend the real meaning of Evola’s utterances about the Jews.

  A little footnote on page 187 of my early edition of Men among the Ruins has always mesmerised me. According to Evola, it was the title of an obscure French pamphlet. It claimed that Hitler, malgre’ lui, was himself the instrument of a diabolical world conspiracy. Needless to say, the conspiracy was a Jewish one. The thesis is so absurd that only a Dadaist of sort – one of a particularly bizarre kind - could have come up with it. Yet, this aberrant fantasy can be found, of all places, in a fictional book by a prestigious Jewish intellectual, George Steiner. The scenario of The Portage of San Christobal of A.H. is implausible but haunting. Adolf Hitler is tracked down still hale and hearty in a South American jungle. An Israeli team kidnaps the Fuhrer, to take him to Israel for an epoch-making trial. On the way, Hitler soliloquises a lot. He mounts his own self-defence. The gist is that “You Jews should be grateful to me. My millenarian Reich collapsed under the onslaught of three world powers but, thanks to me, to my persecutions of your race, your own millenarian dream of a resurgent state of Israel has become reality. I died, so that you, my enemies, might live.”

  It is of course a twisted argument but what makes it remarkable is that it is proposed in a book by so eminent a mind as George Steiner. Also, it seems to cohere with the claim of the anonymous French pamphlet Evola quoted. Hitler as Israel’s unwitting instrument. Some will find it offensive. Evola accepted that. Well before Steiner wrote his book, Evola told me that, shockingly: ‘There should be a statue to Hitler in public squares in Israel.’ His reason was similar to that Steiner puts in the Fuhrer’s imaginary mouth. When I told Isacco what Evola had said, he became angry. We argued for hours. “Why do you have anything to do with someone like that?” he shouted at me. He knew about Evola, of course, but hated him. Still, Isacco loved me. We agreed to disagree.

  I wonder...Crazy, perhaps, but...Sometimes I have wondered whether Evola himself could not be seen as a sort of patsy, an improbable instrument forged by his enemies, an unimaginable cabal, in order to discredit traditionalist ideas. Too Dadaist to believe, I admit it!

  THAT RACIST, WINSTON

  There is no question in my min
d that, however stoical, the Baron in his dark moods felt bitter about the extent of his reputation as a racist. Whether deliberately sought or not, the disgrace it had brought him in post-fascist Italy had made him into a pariah. His writings were never reviewed and his name regularly ignored by the cultural mafia holding sway over the country. That was unfair, as all sorts of famous men had been enthusiastic racists and got away with it. When the name of Churchill cropped up one day, he assured me that Churchill was guilty of the most extreme anti-Semitism – by which he meant anti-Arab prejudice.

  ‘Churchill is hailed as a world statesman and as a saviour of his country and yet he was an out-and-out racist. You don’t believe me? It is a fact. There is a document, authentic, not a forgery, that leaves no doubt about it. Von Leers sent me a copy just the other day...’

  Evola then rummaged for a while and came up with a typescript. He read out certain bits aloud. I don’t remember them verbatim but later I tracked down the document in question. I can therefore quote, more or less literally, the passages the Baron read out to me.

  ‘Churchill spoke before a certain British commission on Palestine in the late ‘30s. He boasted that no wrong had been done to peoples like the Red Indians and the Australian aboriginals. Because a stronger, higher race had dispossessed them, taken them over. A “higher race”, that is what Churchill said.’

  ‘It all goes back to the 1917 Balfour declaration. The British Foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, committed the British Empire to creating a national home for the Jews in Palestine after the war. Balfour was a Christian and cared not a jot for the Jews but the deal was necessary to bring America into the war...For the Zionists the declaration became their Magna Carta...Churchill candidly admitted that England did not issue the declaration for reasons of altruism. No great love for the Jews, in other words. It was in order “to gain great advantages” for England. Remember that back then Britain was fighting the war in alliance with Imperial Russia. The land of pogroms against the Jews. You could hardly expect the Jews to be happy about that. But, after the Balfour declaration, things changed dramatically. Influential American Zionists helped to get the US into the war alongside Britain. Do you follow?’

  ‘The Zionists poured more colonists into Palestine. And bought up plenty of Arab land. The Arabs rose up. The chairman of the commission before which Churchill gave evidence was a Lord Peel. From Churchill’s own public school, Harrow. Fellow old boys...Peel called the Arabs “an inferior race”. He said the Jews would dominate them in all sorts of ways. Churchill agreed. He spoke of Palestine under the Arabs as “a desert”. By contrast, the Jews had made it flourish, turned it into a garden, a paradise.’

  ‘Churchill hated Islam. Before the Commission, he dropped the mask. He insulted Muslims: “...the great hordes of Islam swept over those places...broke it all up”. When another member of the commission pointed out that the Arabs had created a great civilisation in Spain, Churchill’s reply was curt: “I am glad they were thrown out...it is a lower manifestation, the Arab.”

  ‘This document is full of terms no one could describe but as racist. There is no question that he meant them. He was speaking confidentially...And yet this man is revered, idolised by millions. As a statesman, his racism had dire consequences for millions of Palestinian Arabs. And other nations. I, on the other hand, am only a writer, a scholar. My ideas made no political impact at all. Yet, I am treated as a reprobate and ostracised. Where is the justice in that?’

  ‘It is remarkable the way Churchill brought in Italy, speaking before the commission. He conjured up the spectre of a fascist Palestine, should Britain have cleared out. The Italians, this scoundrel said, “would be ruthless...They would exterminate the whole lot of their opponents...The Arabs would never out up with the Italians...the Jews could perfectly well manage to do it.” That reads quite droll today, don’t you think? Our country counts for less than nothing in world politics. Foreigners consider us an incompetent, harmless, spaghetti-eating lot. To think that by the time Churchill said that Italy was a confident, aggressive power, aspiring to lord it over other nations! Did Churchill really believe Mussolini wanted to grab Palestine? I am sure he only used that bogey to impress his hearers. Mussolini was a big bluffer but he was not as foolish as that. Palestine would have been too much of a hot potato. Can you picture it? The Middle East as a partnership between Italians and Jews! It would be an Opera Buffa. A joke. Well, indeed in the end that was what fascism turned out to be. But the fault lay not so much with Mussolini as with the Italians...You know what I think, my views, no need to spell them out again.’

  He once compared himself to the Athenian hero Phocion. That was in relation to his terrible reputation in the eyes of the bien-pensants, which actually meant virtually everybody in Italy. Phocion, an honest and upright man, would not bend to the wishes of the democratic mob. After his death, they even denied him burial within the city. ‘A man after my own heart’, Evola said.

  Someone had cheered Phocion after a speech. “I must have said something stupid”, Phocion observed, “Otherwise they would not be cheering me.” ‘I am like Phocion’, he stated. ‘After the war, I could have jumped on the bandwagon of the new, “democratic and progressive” Italy. The imbeciles would have applauded me. Of course, I would then have had to write imbecilities. No, thanks. Like Phocion, I consider it a point of honour to be hated. I revel in it.’

  THE WHORE TOLERANCE

  In Italy brothels traditionally were called case di tolleranza – literally, ‘tolerance houses’. It prompted him to relate what the French writer Paul Claudel, a combative Catholic convert, had once quipped. It was during a conference of some kind. A heckler had taken objection to something Claudel had said and shouted: “Don’t you believe in tolerance?’ Claudel had shot back: “Tolerance, huh? Cher Monsieur, yes, tolerance. There are houses for it!”

  ‘It was an apposite remark’, he said. ‘Tolerance is suitable for whores. Characters with no authentic, strong principles. Even the Church, in times of old, taught that “error has no rights”. She could not tolerate sin. Claudel had the courage of his prejudices – or, rather, his judgments. The most intolerant, obnoxious people, as history shows, are those who make the loudest profession of tolerance. Even Locke, that wishy-washy Englishman, the apostle of latitudinarianism – the accommodation of all religious views into the mercantile nation state that was England after the “Inglorious Revolution” of 1688 – Locke was not willing to tolerate atheism and Catholicism. To him, they were intolerable. A veritable contradiction...The French revolutionaries were the worst...Preaching the brotherhood of man, la fraternite’, while exterminating those “brothers” they disagreed with. I would be willing to embrace their notion of tolerance, too. I would accord to them the same treatment...’ And he drew his hand across his throat, in eloquent gesture.

  He had inveighed against the French revolutionary triad – liberty, equality, fraternity – before. From his point of view, an objectionable slogan. But Hilaire Belloc, that entertaining English radical right-wing thinker, had opined that there was nothing in the three principles that contradicted the theology of the Catholic Church. I myself could not see what was wrong with liberty and fraternity. Equality was trickier, yes but even that could be construed in acceptable ways. I thought all that but contradicting the Baron was something I could not bring myself to do. Besides, listening to him was much more fun!

  A GIRL FRIEND FOR EVOLA

  His writings had somehow gained him a reputation for being a misogynist. Actually, totally unwarranted. When, much later, I fully digested The Metaphysics of Sex, perhaps his finest book, I realised how deeply woman-friendly the Baron really was. Indeed, it can be said that he brought the feminine into the very heart of God. The Catholic Church, despite the cult of the Virgin Mary, never went anywhere near that. But, back then, it took me a while to bring myself to ask him whether a girl friend of mine, Maria, could have come along to see him. Not that I liked the idea but Maria had insisted. She
had grown suspicious, even jealous of this mysterious character I regularly visited. Besides, she was left-wing...I expected Evola to be chilly, perhaps to cold-shoulder her. Nothing of the kind. The first thing he did was to kiss her hand. As he was crippled and could not get up from his chair, he begged Maria to come closer and then with a flourish he bestowed a kiss on her hand. Not only that. He became quite flirtatious, paying her compliments and making suggestive jokes. ‘Can I have her telephone number?’ he asked. Like Disraeli with Queen Victoria, he certainly knew how to carry favour with a woman. Maria, leftist or not, was charmed. Not that she could make any sense of what our host was saying. In that, Evola was a bit mischievous. Having shown his perfect manners with a lady, he embarked on a long disquisition on Hegelian philosophy. Too much for both of us. So, when door bell rang and Evola profusely apologised - he was obliged to receive someone else - we felt relief. We thanked him and left. “Strange but wonderful man” Maria said, as we walked downstairs. “But, his monocle...that’s a bit funny, isn’t it?” “He only wore it for you”, I said. My girl looked really chuffed.

  PERFIDIOUS ALBION AND THE GRAIL

  He was by no means enamoured of modern England. His memories of WW2, in which English armies smashed Italy’s short-lived African empire, prevented that. Nor could the English parliamentarian and liberal traditions appeal to him. Still, he was familiar with the kings and queens of medieval, pre-Reformation England, as well as with all sorts of remote English lore. Years before I saw London I learnt from him that there was a reference to the river Thames in Dante’s Inferno. ‘Lo cor che’n sul Tamigi ancor si cola.’ (X:II.v.120.) The “heart that still bleeds by the Thames” is that of Prince Henry, the nephew of King Henry III, who was murdered near Rome, in the Viterbo Cathedral, by the sons of Simon of Montfort. His heart was brought back to England and placed in a gold cup by the Shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. Evola considered the assassination of Prince Henry an example of ultimate, hideous treachery. ‘Perhaps it is a consolation: it is not only Italians who indulge in the darkest betrayals’, he observed, drily.