Preface – Eric Houllefort

This preface, written for the second Italian edition of The Disintegration, wants firstly to be a testimonial and also the proof that the text of Freda, which has henceforth become a sort of “classic” in Italy, has found an echo in France. The Disintegration, in this regard, played, with the signing of these lines and others by French “fellow travelers”, the role of revealer: this text has shown them, as clearly as possible, that they had felt confused for many years already, but they were still incapable of transcribing on a new level a coherent and radical political discourse.

It consequently introduces, by showing what are, in the eyes of the French reader who follows it, things close to the same doctrinal and political route of Freda, the principal merits of The Disintegration.

The first and greatest merit of this text is to have concretely enunciated the principle according to which, by taking an expression from Evola himself, being “an integral traditionalist” today is the best way to be radically revolutionary. Therein, Freda was the first to not content himself with commenting on Evola, but extracting from the Evolian theory of practice, the practice of the theory, or, to continue to speak like Marx, to pass from a critique of weapons to the weapons of critique. Thus, it has filled in what we are well obliged to call a lacuna in the work of Evola, to know the incapacity of transcribing on a new level of political combat some normative principles is perfectly exposed. After having recognized himself in Ride the Tiger the untimeliness of a book like Men Among the Ruins (untimely of the sole level of historical application, evidently), Evola had magisterially defined the internal line of struggle of the differentiated man: what we could all an “active nihilism.” But, so curiously, it did not leave to the radical existentialism of this differentiated man another possibility, on the political level, that of fighting on lost positions. Here reappears the ancien regime side of Evola and the mentality of the “last stand,” an exclusively defensive mentality that does not cease to refresh “the cup of bitterness”, from Metternich to the neo-Fascists of today who are still “defending the West.”

On the contrary, the tone of The Disintegration is, from the first to the last line, resolutely offensive and that is why we can believe that we can say, without ceding the slightest to the taste of originality, that The Disintegration affirms one of these practices – the political practice – of the theory exposed in Ride the Tiger. In itself, this text is an example of true fidelity to a work, a fidelity to the spirit and not only the letter, a very authentic and very fertile fidelity like that of certain “Vestals” consecrated to the quasi-priestly defense of a work and a man still foreign to all dogmatism and all ideology. On this subject, the hardest words that Freda has for certain “Evolians”, for “the sterile apologetics of ‘discourse’ on the state”, the “adorers of abstractions and inevitable logic,” the “champions of conceptual testimonials,” are clearly justified. Because when “the average Evolian” affirms that he has exceeded politics, he can offer no opening to his “existential quest,” that he only gives importance to the Awakening and internal realization, there is the too often the objective game of the system that, by its absolute dictatorship of image and appearance, is very well satisfied by the presence on the right, of a pseudo-aristocratic appeal and, on the left, a pseudo-revolutionary appeal. He does not see that his sole liberty had been reduced to choosing a mannerism; all as his alter ego of the other extreme that said: “that he wants everything, because in reality, hopeless from waiting for the least real goal, he wants nothing more than to know he wants everything, in that hope that someone will suddenly admire his assurance and his beautiful soul. He must have a totality that, like himself, is without content. He ignores the dialectic because, by refusing to see his own life, he refuses to understand the times. The times make him afraid because it makes qualitative leaps, irreversible choices, chances that will never return.”¹

The second merit of The Disintegration is to recall – and with what vigor! – that practically all the ideological infections that presently smother humanity have germinated on the soil of Europe, then were conveyed by the Europeans. It is a reminder of the first importance regarding a milieu, seeing Europe on the bench of the accused, believes itself obligated, by a sort of imbecilic reflex, to systematically exalt all that was born in Europe or, still worse, everyone that has white skin. It is one more time, a typically right wing attitude, just as the defensive and idealist petite bourgeois mentality previously denounced: an attitude that consists of, to utilize graphic but evocative language, of only considering the magnitude but not the direction above all of vector. Thus, we will see for example tomorrow, cohorts of neo-Fascists, with some survivors of the Second World War, go to ride the South African “vector”, because there are still “pure race” whites there or because “well intentioned” recruiting agents made them recall the pro-German past of Vorster (the “magnitude” of the vector); they simply will forget that South Africa is marked, from its origin, by Protestantism- and thus, by mercantilism -and today the Pretoria-Tel Aviv axis functions very effectively (the “direction” of the vector). All the “right” is therein: aestheticism, romanticism, sentimentality: total absence of political conscience. On the plan equally. The Disintegration demarcates a salutary rupture.

The third merit of the text of Freda is to bring to light well, in parallel with the exposition of the “physiognomy of the authentic state,” the inorganic property of modern society. The heritage of two thousand years of “Judeo-Christian infection”, thus said Freda, “between the secular domain of the state and the abstract ‘spiritual’ plan,” translated in the individual by an incapacity to live simultaneously, and not alternatively, on many distinct plans. Existence becomes a sequence of foreign moments from one to the other, without any cohesion, that authorizes – it is the most serious here – all separations and all possible compensations, including those who pretend to be declared adversaries of the system. Thus, it is the revolutionary project that becomes a simple exorcism, “vulgar sacralization of the daily routine,” which tends to “edify an independent empire in the clouds of a speculatory radicalism.”² By underlining what he cannot have, in every “normal” civilization, any opposition between the realization of the final ends of the state and those of man, Freda indirectly shows that the first need of whoever wants to be a revolutionary militant is to grant himself the most possible vision of the world of which he is the bearer in his own life, under the penalty of falling into ideology. In this domain, Freda himself is an example for all: his absolute refusal of aligning with the mangy dogs of the bourgeoisie press for more than five years now, his contempt for all dubious publicity, are the indisputable proof of his revolutionary coherence and his political conscience. His writings and his attitude confirm, certainly more than the action of certain men of the ultra-left – to whom he made a loyal offer of common struggle and who did not have the good judgment to respond – the accuracy of the lines of Marx, found in The German Ideology: “Individuals are what they manifest in their lives. How they thus coincide with their production, as well as by what they produce and the manner in which they produce it.”

The Disintegration also contains another innovative element in relation to Evolian discourse: we want to speak of the advent of the Fourth Estate. Thus for Evola, the Fourth Estate can only lead to its end the involutionary processes started by the bourgeoisie long ago, for Freda, whose revolt against all that is bourgeois and the dictatorship of the economy is truly visceral, the Fourth Estate is not the “unnatural spirituality” of the modern world, but rather the possibility of “the restoration of the human,” through the emergence of an ascetic and military way of life, the simplification of relations between citizens, in sum the advent of a “new essence,” like that predicted by Jünger in Der Arbeiter, following the decomposition of the bourgeois world, decomposition beginning from the First World War, when the credos of the 19^th century were effaced before the return of elementary energies. In this regard, the sympathy of Freda for Chinese Communism – strongly understandable sympathy, for when we reflect on it a bit – and the communist model for the “organization of the people’s state” exposed in The Disintegration are emblematic confirmation of the preceding lines. (*)

The future will say that Evola or Freda was right on this point. At least the position of Freda, that is expressed here in the partisan, in the sense of Carl Schmitt, animated by a permanent political conscience, an immediate sense of relation to forces and an intuition capable of seizing the profound reality of a political phenomenon behind the vocabulary of its facade and its coating to pass – at least this position has the merit of inciting struggle and clarifying certain engagements.

There is finally one last point – very important – where The Disintegration also affirms itself as a text of rupture: the discourse of Freda is not only an anti-bourgeois discourse, it’s also an anti-capitalist discourse. Now these two things are not always together, because one of the characteristics of Fascism is the incapacity to pass from the anti-bourgeois to the anti-capitalist. A young French university student, who came to report by two objective, rigorous, and well documented works this phenomenon regarding Drieu: “The judgment regarding capitalism, by the symmetric theory of the black beast to the red beast, effectively appears strictly moralizing and psychological (‘selfishness’, ‘cupidity’) … In reality, it recovers a real fascination for the ascendant era of “heroic” capitalism and for the captains of industry defined by Drieu himself as ‘frightfully beneficent.’ The collaborationist, the Fascist, is not anti-capitalist, he is anti-bourgeois.”³

With Freda, there is no doubtful nostalgia for capitalism, “heroic” or not; no more little admiration for these “merchants of shock” that are certain colonists or founders of trusts. Here the anti-bourgeois revolt derives from a vision of the world, anterior and superior to anything put in rational form, but not exhausted in the aesthetic sublimation of an anarchism of the right. In the consequent fashion, it gives itself the means to achieve its ends. On this subject, the chapter on “the organization of the people’s state” plays, by its radicalism, the role of stumbling block: faced with such a model, we are obligated to take a position – and to show clearly what camp we belong to.

All the qualities enumerated since the beginning (the rupture with neo-Fascist confusion; the definitive abandonment of right wing attitudes; the will to go encounter sectors objectively engaged in the negation of the bourgeois world) make The Disintegration, the dawning of the long march of European Revolution, the manifesto of the partisan of the fourth front: the European front, which must open, after the fronts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, to vanquish American-Zionist imperialism, the enemy of man. We have without a doubt not finished speaking of this little booklet…

Author’s Warning

Speaking of myself – taking myself, consequently, seriously – is something that is only disposed in favor of “bad taste” by he who indulges it. I thus requested that Professor Claudio Mutti, for a brief presentation of the French edition of the booklet, formulate some observations: observations that have above all shed light on real limits. But friends are destined to be indulgent towards their friends… To palliate, consequently, this indulgence of my friend Mutti in this regard, I will thus summarize my position – which applies also as a “warning” for the reader -: in The Disintegration, there is nothing original; on the staff, there are only notes and commas; nearly everything there is original …

Introduction to the Second Edition – Claudio Mutti

The text published here in French translation was born in Italy, during the year 1969, when the phenomenon of “student dissent” had provoked the illusion of a definitive turn that would intervene in the history of this interminable and stifling post-war era.

Facing the “revolt” of 1968-69, many, in effect, were inclined to believe that mobilization for the destruction of the bourgeois system had commenced; it acted, on the contrary, as a simple – but vociferous – readjustment of the system, thus it is true that in this “revolt” engendered by the insufficiency and failures of the regime, the anarchoid and anti-authoritarian whims that characterize petty bourgeoisie nature took a large part. Of the illusion that we spoke of above, we find no trace in The Disintegration of the System, which even affirms the necessity of a radical and absolute subversion; thus it was not a vain optimism that lead the author to publish this text, but the deep conviction that everything should be attempted, particularly at the moment where different youth were searching to give a revolutionary content to the student revolts, to avoid its extinction in Marxist reformism or bogging down in the swamp of moderation.

It is to these youth that The Disintegration of the System addresses itself, by reiterating, as the natural and normal premise of their action, the principles of the True State.

For the first time, the formulation of the “traditional” doctrine of the State gave rise, under the scheme of operational instructions, to a coherent and intransigent position of refusal of bourgeois “values.”

Those who claimed, hitherto, the “traditional” doctrine of the state, did not leave academic and nostalgic verbiage; in the worst case – and it was not a very rare case – they descended into the domain of political action (or, better, agitation) by enlisting, as poorly paid mercenaries, in the service of the bourgeois rear-guard, utilizing Evolianism as a coarse alibi for “reactionary” choices.

On the contrary, in the formulation of Freda, the doctrine of the True State was understood in the sense of an integral and irreducible opposition to the bourgeois world; the communist organization of the Popular State, that is presented in The Disintegration as an alternative to the society of merchants, is only an emergency therapy henceforth indispensable in view of the elimination, of the burial, of homo œconomicus: at first glance the “homeopathic” remedy for the “restoration of the human” to a virile Rangordnung.

Thus it is necessary to recall the contingencies against which the text was directed: recall the deformed and impudent political applications made by numerous “Evolians” and “traditionalists”: that is indispensable if we want to situate the writing of Freda in its right dimension.

However, the other part, beyond the contingencies and what they had conditioned in the communist-aristocratic utopia of Freda, The Disintegration holds an indisputable value, that holds in the fact of “pushing” those who want to engage in the political domain towards positions of radical coherence. We do not demand from them devotion to the “theses” of Freda, but natural reflections of a temperament and style made with clarity, fairness and dry lucidity, deepening – under the plan of existential adherence to its “essential” characteristics – the doctrine of the True State, and the elaboration of a flexible and “disenchanted” strategy of struggle, a strategy turned towards the disintegration of the bourgeois system.