Freda, Heretical Interpreter of Evola – Franco Ferraresi

The gridlock of the system, that seemed happen in Italy in the second half of the 1970s (the government called “national solidarity”), unleashed the protests of those who felt excluded and marginalized. “New needs” appeared with the “new revolutionary subjects” impossible to reduce to the worker’s struggle alone. The struggle against repression and marginalization transformed into a drastic confrontation that henceforth also welcomed the forces of the left against a “palace” (Palazzo). The expulsion of the secretary of the CGIL, Luciano Lama, from the University of Rome is the episode that traces new lines of deployment of forces and of conflict. In this phase, the radical right furnishes an interpretation of many analogous aspects of the radical left, even recovering, at least in part, instruments of analysis and keys to interpretation from the latter, to the point of arriving at the hypothesis of a strategic common line: the immediate common line is the same for both, the destruction of the bourgeois system.

The principal metapolitical point of reference of this analysis is the second of the Evolian political “grand texts,” Ride the Tiger, in the most radical of possible readings, that proposed at the end of the 1960s by Franco Freda. The principal concept of Ride the Tiger, that of apoliteia (1) [ch. VI], is susceptible to least two readings: the first, exclusively concentrated on the internal dimension, leads to a total abstention from all forms of political action; the second interprets apoliteia as a refusal to insert oneself into the political system of today, and thus to adhere to the components that create it (Anti-Tradition), and indicates an exasperated political engagement under form of a militia, “the heroic way,” “holy war” as the most valuable and most authentic instrument of spiritual realization.

That is thus the line suggested by Freda in the “manifesto” that was the most authoritative in the radical right (2). His point of departure is a virulent attack on the concept of Europe, that overthrows the entire political spiritual heritage of the modern West:

“Europe is an old hussy who has whored in all the brothels and has contracted all the ideological infections – since those of revolts of medieval communes to those of anti-imperial national monarchies; from Illuminism to Jacobinism, to Masonry, to Judaism, to Zionism, to liberalism, to Marxism. A whore, whose womb has conceived and engendered the bourgeois revolution and the proletarian revolt: whose soul was posseded by the violence of merchants and the rebellion of slaves. And us, right now, we would like to redeem it?” (The Disintegration of the System)

The result of this Europe is a world totally “other” regarding that of Tradition: it’s the bourgeois, capitalist world, dominated by economic authority and by the exploitation of man by man. The state itself is the political place reserved only to the bourgeoisie, whose unique function is the defense of the bourgeois economy (the debt towards the instruments of Marxist analysis is explicit and declared). To that he opposed the idea of the “true state” (vero Stato), as an absolute reality, values that transcend contingent historical realizations (the Evolian inspiration is evident here). This conception is the source of inspiration for the “popular state” proposed by Freda in an articulated and analytic project, whose only relative indications of external politics can be reprised here, by reasons of the consequences that they have on the general strategic choices (“the field of battle”) of the extreme right:

“The denunciation of the Atlantic Pact and its military organization, as the rupture of relations that link Italy today the neocapitalist structures (European Economic Community, etc…) must provoke the active insertion of the Popular State into the sphere of states that refuse to be snagged by the politics of imperialist blocs of power. The Popular State will establish alliances with all the authentically anti-capitalist states and favor on the international level, movements of struggle against capitalism and the revisionist accomplices.”

This type of affirmation, as the repeated declarations of sympathy for Chinese communism because of the sober, Spartan, warrior style that characterizes it (beside the anti-imperialist struggle) is at the base of the “Nazi-Maoist” formula by which they often characterize the theories of Freda. This constitutes the basis of one of the most important passages of the itinerary of Freda, the hypothesis of a solidarity with the left. It is not solely a theoretical hypothesis, but a veritable strategic proposition of “common struggle,” that Freda addresses “to those who radically refuse the system, lying beyond the traditional left, in the certainty that even with them we could realize a loyal unity of action against bourgeois society.” Well understood, they are foreign to metaphysical premises, they do not pursue the myth of the “true state,” the super-human, metapolitical, metahistorical directions of a superior “reality”: but in the temporal historical order, their objective is the same, the destruction of the bourgeois system. That’s why a coherent unity of action is to be inaugurated with all the forces engaged in the struggle for the elimination of the system, by repudiating legalist and reformist tactics, and “all guilty hesitation before the use of all the means, drastic and decisive, that only violence possesses.” (3)

 

Franco Ferraresi, extract from : «  Les références théorico-doctrinales de la droite radicale en Italie », Mots n°12, 1986.

Evola. Philosophy and Direct Action – Dominique Venner

Considered by certain people as “the greatest traditionalist thinker of the Occident,” Julius Evola (1898-1974) always had difficult relations with the MSI while exercising a certain influence on the most radical circles, the FAR in their time then Ordine Nuovo or Avanguardia Nazionale. Evola was held on the margins of Fascism during the Ventennio (1922-1943). Despite his criticisms, however, he still wanted solidarity with the Italian Social Republic after 1943. Influenced by both Nietzsche and Guénon, he cultivated in fashion of the first the contempt of the plebeian and the praise of the self-made superman. But he joined Guénon in his interpretation of history as a process of decadence and involution leading, according to the Hindu tradition, to the Kali Yuga, the demonic age preceding the return to primordial chaos (1). However, he was ready to recognize that certain political forms, more or less in accord with his hierarchical idea of Tradition, could slacken the decline. Such was his interpretation of fascism, in the measure where it, by its attempt to rehabilitate heroic values, constituted a challenge to modern societies and to the faceless mass man.

In the eyes of the militants or intellectual of the young post-fascist generation, Evola presented the advantage of proceeding from a vigorous internal critique of fascism without ceding to anti-fascism. He offered a coherent and sophisticated “vision of the world,” pitiless for modernity, to which he opposed a construction far more radical and absolute than that of fascism (2). Condemning for example nationalism for its “naturalist” inspiration, Evola opposed to it “the race of the spirit” and “the idea, our true fatherland.” What counted, he said, “it is not sharing the same earth or speaking the same language, it’s sharing the same idea (3).” What idea? That of a superior order, which ancient Rome, Medieval Chivalry, or Prussia had expressed. He proposed a style of life made with severity, discipline, durability, sacrifice, practiced as asceticism. Evola was not a pure spirit. He had served in the artillery in the course of the First World War, and had been, in his youth, a distinguished alpinist, author of the admirable Meditations on the Peaks. At his death, his ashes were deposited on the summit of Monte Rosa.

Towards 1950, then believing in the chances of the MSI, Evola wanted to give a warrior’s “bible” to the young militants of this movement: that was Men Among the Ruins (*), prefaced with an essay by Prince Borghese (4). His hopes were dashed, he withdrew from the MSI and all political action beginning in 1957. He would publish Ride the Tiger a bit later (1961), (**) a difficult work that contradicted the preceding one (5). He declared in substance that in a world going to its ruin, nothing was worth saving, the sole categorical imperative being to follow the interior way with a perfect detachment from all that surrounds us, but by assuming that what life offers is painful and tragic. This message raised lively controversies in the sect of those ironically called “the Witnesses of Evola.” Some understood it as an invitation to retire from the world, and others as a invitation to dynamite decadent society. It is this part of the message which would be understood by the Italian adepts of brutal activism that would manifest in the course of the “years of lead.”

What Ride the Tiger expressed reflected the disgust that swamp of petty parliamentary politics in which the MSI sank could inspire in even the most idealistic. But, beyond that, was the evolution of Western and Italian society submitting to the hold of consumerism and materialism.

In the course of the following decades, the generalization of violence and terrorism on the left had some important effects within the radical right that influenced the philosopher. The two principal extra-parliamentary organizations, Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale, having been dissolved in 1973, grew to illegality. But this strategy was broken by outright repression.

However, a new generation was at work who had made a superficial reading of Evola. Born after 1950, foreign to the historical memory of fascism, it willingly criticized the “old guard” of the MSI, and the equally sacred monsters of the activist right, of the Borghese type, and their obsolete strategy of the coup d’Etat. They proclaimed emphatically the end of ideology and the primacy of action. For this generation of very young militants, before the void of old dead values, combat remained as an existential value. “It is not to power that we aspire, nor to the creation of a new order,” one read in 1980 in Qex, newsletter of political prisoners of the right. “It’s the struggle that interests us, it’s action itself, the affirmation of our own nature.” The influence of Ride the Tiger was evident. But that, which according to Evola, should have resulted in an internal asceticism, was here reduced to its most brutal literal meaning, by identification with the simplistic myth of the “warrior.” This derivation lead to the summary theorization of “armed spontaneity,” as much as retreat into an esoteric ivory tower.