Although the Cold War between the USSR and USA is over, this makes Evola’s insights in this point all the more prescient. As long as communism and the Soviet Union were perceived as external enemies, the USA could sustain internally a certain amount of reaction and conservatism to define itself as the opposite of the USSR. However, once the wall came down, the right in the USA became irrelevant, so that progressive forces could continue unchecked, no longer subject to the charge of being pro-marxist and treasonous.
Evola was not deceived and recognized that the various movements, ostensibly in opposition, were in fact different degrees of the same frame of mind. The imagery he uses of the dusk and poison are beautifully written. Little else has changed in 60 years, since the trends he abhors are still considered to be “progress”, and the West is in a constant state of “waiting” … waiting for the culmination of this “progress” in the indefinite future in who knows what form. Since the “real” world only exists in the future, the past, and Tradition, are thereby disvalued. Evola may be placing too much blame on the USA, for Europe herself has been equally complicit, if not even leading the way. He is correct, though, in a significant point: the battle has been lost without even a shot being fired.
Not only as a doctrinal orientation, but also in regard to the world of action, it is then important for men of the new arrangement to recognize correctly the concatenation of causes and effects and the essential continuity of the trend that has given life to the various political forms in play today in the chaos of parties. Liberalism, then democracy, then socialism, than radicalism, finally communism and Bolshevism have historically appeared only as degrees of the same evil, as stages that prepare each one that follows in the complex of a process of decline. And the beginning of this process stands at the point at which Western man broke his ties to tradition, denying every higher symbol of authority and sovereignty; he claimed for himself as an individual a vain and illusory freedom; he becomes an atom rather than a conscious part of the organic unity and hierarchy of a whole. And the atom, in the end, had to find, opposed to himself, the mass of other atoms, other individuals, and to be involved in the emergence of the reign of quantity, of the pure number, of the materialized masses and not having another God outside of the sovereign economy.
This process does not stop here halfway. Without the French Revolution and liberalism, there would not have been constitutionalism and democracy, without democracy, there would not have been socialism and demagogic nationalism, without the preparation of socialism there would not have been radicalism and finally communism. The fact that these various forms today often represent, one alongside the other or in opposition, must not prevent the recognition, to an eye that truly sees, that they hold themselves together, they link to each other, mutually condition each other and express only the different degrees of the same trend, the same subversion of every normal and legitimate social order.
So the great illusion of our time is that democracy and liberalism are the antitheses of communism and have the power to stem the tide of the forces from below, of what in the jargon of the syndicates are called the “progressive” movement. Illusions: like those who say that the dusk is the opposite of the night, that the incipient degree of an evil is the antithesis of the acute and endemic form of it, that a diluted poison is the antidote of the same poison in its pure and concentrated state. The men in the government of this “liberated” Italy have learned nothing from recent history whose lessons were repeated everywhere to the point of monotony, and continue their pitiful game with out-of-date political conceptions and hands in the parliamentary carnival, almost a dance macabre on a simmering volcano.
But for us there must instead be the courage of radicalism, the “no” said to political decadence in all its forms, both of the left and of a presumed right. And, above all, we must be aware of that which he does not share with subversion, and that making concessions today means condemning oneself to be totally overwhelmed tomorrow. The rigour of the idea, therefore, and readiness to push ahead by pure force when the right moment is reached.
That naturally also implies the disengagement from ideological distortions, unfortunately popular even in a part of the youth, because of which they indulge in excuses for the destruction that has already happened, deluding themselves by thinking that they, after all, were necessary and served “progress”; they think that it must be combated for anything “new”, put off into a determined future, rather than for the truth that we already possess because they, although in various forms of application, always and everywhere made from the base of every right type of social and political organization.
These foibles must be rejected. And we come back to those who are accused of being “anti-historical” and “reactionary”. History does not exist, a mysterious entity spelled with a capital H. They are the men, if even they are really men, who make and unmake history; so called “historicism” is more or less the same thing as what is called “progressivism” in leftist circles and it wants a single thing today: to foment passivity in respect to the trend that swells and always leads lower. And, as to “reactionism”, you ask: You would therefore prefer that while you act, destroying and profaning, we do not “react”, but stay to look so that they say to you: bravo!, continue? We are not “reactionary” only because the word is not strong enough especially because we start from the positive, we represent the positive, real and original values, the light of some “sun of the future” is not necessary.
In the face of our radicalism, in particular, the antithesis between the red “East” and the democratic “West” appears irrelevant, yet a possible armed conflict between these two blocks appears to us also tragically irrelevant it. To look only at the immediate, the choice of the lesser evil certainly remains because the military victory of the “East” would imply the immediate physical destruction of the last exponents of resistance. But at the base of the idea, Russia and North America are to be considered as two prongs of the same pincer because they squeeze themselves permanently around Europe. In two different but converging forms, the same foreign and hostile force acts in them. The forms of standardization, conformism, democratic leveling, frenetic productivity, a more or less domineering and explicit “brain trust”, and piecemeal materialism in Americanism can only serve to pave the road for the last phase that is represented, along the same direction, by the communist ideal of the mass-man.
The distinctive character of Americanism is that the attack against quality and personality is not put into effect by the brute force of a Marxist dictator and the mind of the State, but it happens almost spontaneously, by the ways of a civilization ignorant of ideals higher than wealth, consumption, productivity, production without brakes. Therefore, through a worsening and a reduction to the absurd of what Europe herself chose, the same patterns have taken, or are taking, form there. But primitivism, mechanism, and brutality remain so much more on one side than the other. In a certain sense, Americanism is more dangerous for us than communism, because it is a type of Trojan horse. When the attack against the residual values of European tradition is effectuated in the direct and naked forms characteristic of Bolshevik ideology or Stalinism, some reactions still reawaken, certain lines of resistance, even if ephemeral, can be maintained. Things are different when the same evil acts in a more subtle way and the transformations take place on the plane of the general customs and visions of life, as is the case for Americanism. Enduring this influence with a light heart in the name of democracy, Europe is already predisposed for the final abdication, so that it could even happen without even the need for a military disaster, but it will arrive, through “progressive” path, after a final social crisis, at more or less at the same point. Again, it doesn’t stop here halfway. Americanism, willing it or not, works for its apparent enemy, for collectivism.
Please be relevant.