Romanticism. Conversely, Mussolini is classicism, with his hierarchies, his following, and, above all, reason.” Quoted in Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain: 1923–1977 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 160.
148 Paul Preston, The Politics of Revenge: Fascism and the Military in 20th Century Spain (New York: Routledge, 2005), 24.
149 Payne, Fascism in Spain, 136–39.
150 Janek Wasserman, Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918–1938 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 105.
151 Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 244.
152 Andreas Umland, “Classification, Julius Evola and the Nature of Dugin’s Ideology,” in Griffin, Loh, and Umland, eds., Fascism Past and Present, West and East, 486.
153 This term was originally conceived by scholar John Breuilly and articulated in Thorpe, Pan-Germanism, 22.
154 According to leftist scholar Daniel Guérin, heavy industry and big banks investing in fixed capital, machines, and raw materials played a large role in sustaining fascism, rather than see their factories turned over to workers; Daniel Guérin, Marxism and Big Business (New York: Pathfinder, 1974); Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, 81.
155 See Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, 86.
156 Edwin Dakin, “Henry Ford, Man or Superman?” Nation, March 26, 1921, 336–41.
157 Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and Grass-Roots America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 4.
158 Ford and General Motors built “nearly 90 percent of the armored ‘mule’ 3-ton half-trucks and more than 70 percent of the Reich’s medium and heavy-duty trucks…‘the backbone of the German Army transportation system.’” US Congress, The Industrial Reorganization Act: Hearings, Ninety-third Congress, First Session, on S 1167, Part 9 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1974), A-22.
159 Ibid., A-17, A-142.
160 When the committee published its report, it redacted crucial aspects of the testimony, including insinuations that Du Pont would help provide weapons to the coup through its connections with the American Liberty League. Unfortunately, the two histories of this case do not call Butler’s testimony into question and end up sounding like conspiracy theories. See Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2015) and Glen Yeadon, The Nazi Hydra in America (San Diego: Progressive Press, 2008).
161 Quote by William Randolph Hearst, quoted in Clifford Sharp, “How Strong Is Hitler?,” Readers’ Digest 23, no. 137 (1933): 44.
162 Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000), 141–46
163 Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 33.
164 William Vance Trollinger, God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 77.
165 Joseph F. Dinneen, “An American Führer Organizes an Army,” American 74, no. 2. (1937): 14–15.
166 Ibid., 157.
167 Mogens Pelt, “The ‘Fourth of August’ Regime in Greece,” in Costa Pinto and Kallis, eds., Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe, 200–214.
168 This estimated number includes China and Japan.
Chapter 2: Spirit and Subculture
Julius Evola and Sacralized Violence
Now that we have unearthed and attempted to reconstruct the rubble of the fascist nightmare, we can gain a better grasp on the workings of fascism and fascist ideology—how it justifies its existence and creeps within the margins of both right and left, seducing both sides with promises of a radical, revolutionary future where the opposing side would no longer exist. However, we have left a major concern untouched: the “occult” aspect of fascism that survived the war—its spiritual-sacred aspect that provided more than a passing curiosity for its leadership. The ideologies of Arthur Rosenberg, Heinrich Himmler, Julius Evola, and numerous other pseudo-intellectuals provided fascism with a kind of mystique that animated the rhetorical framework of right-left syncretism—visions of Nordic gods on earth, mythical Arctic-born superraces, archaic spiritual signs transcending both science and Judeo-Christian ethics, and cosmic spiritual oaths of samurai loyalty.
Perhaps the most influential of these elite spiritualists remaining after the war was Julius Evola. His followers were unique in that they wanted more than populism would offer; they wanted blood, sacrifice, and ultraviolence; they believed in and became a formidable cult of assassins and bombers bent on infiltrating the left and destroying its public reputation by heightening tensions and causing ever-grander spectacles of destruction and terror. According to future head of the fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI—Italian Social Movement), Giorgio Almirante, Evola could be compared to important leftist intellectuals and theorists: “[He was] our Marcuse, only better.”169 Evola had asserted as early as 1930 in his political review La Torre, “We would like a more radical Fascism, more fearless, a really absolute Fascism, made of pure force, impervious to any compromise.”170 Now he hoped to put that potential into action without Mussolini’s bungling in the way. This Fascism would renounce the tendency to base political power on a mass movement, emphasizing instead an elite of warrior-aristocrats gaining spiritual power over Europe.
After participating in the Dadaist movement as a young man, Evola attached himself to the traditionalist René Guénon, who preached a spiritual doctrine based on his readings of Arab, Buddhist, and Hindu texts. Guénon denounced the materialism of Judeo-Christian ethics, as well as the warmongering nationalism of his era, preferring instead a return to nature and a sense of inner oneness. Like Hitlerite mystic Savitri Devi, Evola agreed with Guénon that the world had sunk into a dark age, a “Kali Yuga,” due to the influence of its Judeo-Christian inheritance and the scientific faith in progress. Evola’s
