What’s on Bannon’s bookshelf? What’s on his list of top most inspiring and influential reads? One item is a clerico-fascist named Julius Evola, whom he name-checked in a speech at a Vatican conference in 2014.
“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.
Stagnation and hierarchy are so much better – provided you have the good fortune to be at the top end of the hierarchy rather than the bottom end.
Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather.
They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a bourgeoisie-smashing new order that he called the Solar Civilization. Today, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works.
More important for the current American administration, Evola also caught on in the United States with leaders of the alt-right movement, which Mr. Bannon nurtured as the head of Breitbart News and then helped harness for Mr. Trump.
“Julius Evola is one of the most fascinating men of the 20th century,” said Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who is a top figure in the alt-right movement, which has attracted white supremacists, racists and anti-immigrant elements.
And the president of the US and many people on his staff.
H/t Rrr
Comments
6 responses to “Children of the Sun”
Bigly honored, Ophelia! Oh, wait … :/
Trump would just look at the pictures.
Wow.
And…Evola’s magical thinking and generic woo-woo has made him turn up on all sorts of New Agey platforms too.
Just to play Devil’s Advocaat (lots of lemonade), a lot depends on what else he has in his collection.
I have an English-language copy of Mein Kampf, a K.J. Bible, The Koran (Eng.), several books by creationists, a smattering of End Times works (I heartily recommend The Prophesied End-Time by Ronald Weinland; hilarious and horrifying in equal parts), books on witchcraft, ghosts, UFO’s – the whole kit and caboodle, but I’m certainly not a Nazi Christo-Muslim End-Timer with a love of the supernatural and ETs.
Or am I?
Sorry, Acolyte of Sagan, I think you gave the game away a long time ago. It’s in your namn, see. Kinda similar to Bann on.
I might try your drink recipe though. Pan galactic gargle blaster gets tame after a while.