Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists

[gpatt0n]

This article was in the news columns of the NYTimes under the heading European news.

 

Seems these folks - particularly the Italians where fascism was born - know more about that governing concept.

 

To say these folks are spooked by the Trump administration's choice of advisors, is an understatement.

 

From the article in the NYTimes:

 

 

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.

Evola, who died in 1974, wrote on everything from Eastern religions to the metaphysics of sex to alchemy. But he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.

snip...

Under the influence of René Guénon, a French metaphysicist and convert to Islam, Evola in 1934 published his most influential work, “The Revolt Against the Modern World,” which cast materialism as an eroding influence on ancient values.

It viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth.

Changing the system, Evola argued, was “not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.”

Evola’s ideal order, Professor Drake wrote, was based on “hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual.”

That made a fan out of Benito Mussolini.

The dictator already admired Evola’s early writings on race, which influenced the 1938 Racial Laws restricting the rights of Jews in Italy.

Mussolini so liked Evola’s 1941 book, “Synthesis on the Doctrine of Race,” which advocated a form of spiritual, and not merely biological, racism, that he invited Evola to meet him in September of that year.

Evola eventually broke with Mussolini and the Italian Fascists because he considered them overly tame and corrupted by compromise. Instead he preferred the Nazi SS officers, seeing in them something closer to a mythic ideal. They also shared his anti-Semitism.

 

These people are dangerous to not just our democracy, but to the enlightenment. They believe we should all live in monasteries and bow to them because they are the kings and the source of all human wisdom and knowledge.

 

Bullcheeze. They are cons out to steal from each of us and if you haven't figure that out, you need to open your eyes.

 

pubby

 

[CitizenCain]

The fact that the Right-Wing Republicans are giving this Neonazi Atisymitc Homophobic bastard a pass is not just disturbing but disgusting. It just shows when it comes to political power their lust knows no bounds. Morality, decency, love of country and democracy mean nothing to them.

[gpatt0n]

The fact that the Right-Wing Republicans are giving this Neonazi Atisymitc Homophobic bastard a pass is not just disturbing but disgusting. It just shows when it comes to political power their lust knows no bounds. Morality, decency, love of country and democracy mean nothing to them.

 

A couple of things here. You use the term right-wing Republicans as if there were such a thing as left-wing Republicans?

 

Second, one of the key tasks in the short term is to recognize that there are people who identify as Republicans who, if we are to avoid Steve Bannon's vision of a chaotic world on the brink of collapse; we need at least five or six Republican Senators and a few more than two-dozen Republican Congressmen to stand for the existing world order.

 

Seriously, the best way out of this calamity is to recognize that Hillary was right about one thing ... we are stronger together ...

 

For that reason, while I have little positive to say about Mr. Trump and his handlers (Putin and Bannon), I recognize that politically the only powers that can subdue an out-of-control executive branch of government are the Congress and the courts.

 

We don't get there by alienating each and every elected congressman or senator or those in the general public whose loyalties and support are with them.

 

CC; we may not agree with them but five or ten percent of the time but if wrestling control of the reigns of power from those whose ideas are contrary and conflict with American ideals of freedom, liberty and democracy, that is enough.

 

pubby