Attuale, a dir poco. Primo libro di Evola letto e davvero positivamente colpito dal suo modo di scrivere, con mente e cuore. ( )

I'm at about 70%, and so far he mostly seems to be very busy pointing out how wrong other people are. I also feel he simplifies a lot of things and maybe doesn't understand them as well as he likes to imagine. This entire book so far seems to be about how amazing he and people who are like him are and why. Though there are some interesting points where it starts to get briefly interesting he loses a lot of credit by over simplifying all the rest. The chapter about music got on my nerves especially. Perhaps because this was a subject I am actually very familiar with. As a musician, I obviously couldn't appreciate what felt like an elephant barging into a porcelain cabinet. He just stamps about and glosses over and expects to understand. Well, no. That just won't work.

Nevertheless...I think I might finish this book, though it's been a drag so far. He might have something interesting to say after all, if he ever gets over bashing other people and pointing out why they are supposedly misguided, stupid, or both.

EDIT: Finished it after all. I have a feeling I might actually have learned something of it after all, though I'm not yet quite sure what exactly (mostly how -not- to to write a book about philosophy, or whatever this is supposed to be). I have a feeling Evola could have presented his ideas much better if..well, to put it bluntly, if he hadn't had such an obviously unpleasant personality ( never mind the fact that he doesn't believe in those, really. He has one. And it is annoying). There are definitely some very thought provoking chapters in there, but even the best parts were soured by sudden - in my opinion completely uncalled for, as they often didn't add anything - attacks on the ideas of others. I just expected more from the book, I guess. Some insight, maybe, more original ideas. I know he thought he was writing from "tradition", so maybe not entirely original but at least clearly worded and somewhat longer parts about his own views. This book is about 70% telling how wrong people are, 15% how great it is not to be like that and another 15% of actual ideas of his own. I wonder if I should try one of his other works. Right now, I don't really have the patience to put up with the whining. ( )

Who is Julius Evola? What does he want? Why does he matter? Do Fascists shit in the woods?

Ride the Tiger starts with some standard criticisms of the Liberal-Democratic-Capitalist-Constitutional world, as well as the Materialist-Marxist-Soviet-COMINTERN world, again noting their focus on material conditions while ignoring 'spiritual' or mental processes. He briefly discusses a few contemporary philosophers in this early stage of analysis. Most of his time is spent wrestling with Nietzsche, his implications from "God is dead", a Zarathusthra, the Apollonian-Dionysian dualism of society, and so forth. He makes a few brief criticisms of Heidegger, Marx and Stirner, and notes the 'new nihilism' of existentialism, and takes a good whack at Sartre.

So what does Evola propose instead? He starts with Nietzsche's view of what must come after nihilism, after God has died, and proposes his new society from there. He advocates something called 'radical traditionalism', with emphasis on the old institutions of Europe which existed before 1789, or perhaps before 476.

Evola is anti-cosmopolitan, anti-financial, anti-Marxist, anti-rational, anti-scientific, anti-pacifist, anti-materialist, anti-feminist, anti-egalitarian, anti-Christian, anti-individual, anti-modern, anti-democratic, anti-bourgeois.

This leaves us with tribal nationalism, agrarianism, neo-paganism, traditional family organization, an aristocratic caste system (with people like him on top, naturally - he was born into Italian nobility) as well as a bit of Eastern Mysticism thrown in, especially the 'Kali Yuga', the 432,000 year long age of darkness and sin in Hindu theology.

He is not solely an ordinary 'traditionalist', with reference to familial customs or little traditions. Instead he wants to throw out all of the changes over the past few hundred years and start again 'anew' with older traditions, a grand mystical warrior existence, 'riding the tiger'. Before the French Revolution, before Marxism, before 'human rights' or 'democracy'.

This is where Evola shows his true inner self - not in his criticism, but what he does advocate. He snarls at modern society, but perhaps because it has passed him by. He is frightened of the 'degeneracy' of the world, and such is made very clear.

He advances a few tentative points against 'scientific rationalism', but these are laughably muddled. For example, because he does not understand atomic theory, it is therefore 'useless knowledge' and to be discarded.

On culture, he is insipid. His rants are that of a grumpy racist grandfather complaining that 'new music' rap jazz is intellectually bankrupt because it is from 'primitive' peoples. I quote:

One can deduce that modern man, especially North American man, has regressed to primitivism in choosing, assimilating, and developing a music οf such primitive qualities as Negro music, which was even originally associated with dark forms οf ecstasy.

Women? Their best place is raising a family. Men are suited for war and should thus kill. The modern world is wholly bosh and should be tossed.

So - the big question: is Evola a fascist? Perhaps, although not necessarily - he was a 'Radical Traditionalist', and gives himself a substantial intellectual covering to prevent himself from being mistaken for a fascist immediately. Though not all traditionalists are fascists, all fascists are traditionalists.

Evola, here, comes across as a man who wants so desperately, so futilely, for the world to be simple, black-and-white, good-and-evil, with himself naturally on the side of good. He wants a return to simplicity, with some people naturally in power (such as himself), and all of the annoying complaints of others (women, people not in his ethnicity, people who aren't 'superior') to be sidelined. Everything else can go. Agriculture, technology, politics, art, all of it which cannot be controlled or changed for the better (and very little can) is to be eliminated. The simple fact is that our modern world is pluralistic, save for a few isolated locals in the Amazon, the Sentinel Islands, and the militias of North Midwest, and this cannot be changed very easily.

One of the core tenets of fascism - at least, fascism in its 20th century unholy incarnations, is the cult of tradition. Hitler had his imagined Aryan race, the restoration of German glory, as well as his 'cult of pastoral life' - his view was for Germany to be a nation of soldier-peasants after the war, gleefully exterminating the brutish Poles and Russians. Mussolini made plain his ambitions for the New Roman Empire, as well as his rejection of democracy. Francisco Franco imagined himself to be a new Crusader of Spain's glory days in the 16th century.

Of course, the poisonous ideas of fascism still endure. Most recently, Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the Utoya massacre imagined himself to be a Crusader, a defender of traditional Europe and its Values, as he bombed civilians.

As such, he is to be pitied as much to be held in contempt for his intellectual garbage, and providing a pleasing lie for the radical traditionalists who complain about 'foreign invasion' on one day, and shoot children in the head and beat homosexuals and immigrants the next.

1 star. ( )

Strhující kritika západní civilizace od magického barona. ( )