Metaphysic of War Julius Evola Liberations It is a principle of ancient wisdom that situations as such never matter as much as the attitude that is assumed in front of them, and therefore the meaning that is attributed to them. Christianity, generalizing from a similar viewpoint, has been able to speak of life as of a “test” and has adopted the maxim,”Vita est militia super terram.” In the quiet and ordered periods of history, this wisdom is accessible only to a few chosen ones, since there are too many occasions to surrender and to sink, to consider the ephemeral to be the important, to forget the instability and contingency of what is irremediably such by nature. It is on this basis that what can be called in the broader sense the mentality of bourgeois life is organized: it is a life which does not know either heights or depths, and develops interests, affections, desires, and passions which, however important they may be from the merely earthly point of view, become petty and relative from the supra-individual and spiritual point of view, which must always be regarded as proper to any human existence worthy of the name. The tragic and disrupted periods of history ensure, by force of circumstances, that a greater number of persons is led towards an awakening, towards a liberation. And, really and essentially, it is by this that the deepest vitality of a stock, its virility and its unshakability in the superior sense, can be measured. And today, in Italy, on that front which by now no longer knows any distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and has therefore seen so many tragic consequences, one should get used to looking at thing from this higher perspective to a much greater extent than is usually possible or necessary. The fact that, nominally, the West professes Christianity, has had only a minimal influence in this respect: the whole doctrine of the supernatural existence of the spirit, and of its survival beyond this word, has not undermined this superstition in any significant way; it has not made knowledge of what did not begin with birth, and cannot end with death, able to act practically on the daily, sentimental and biological life of a sufficient number of beings. Rather, people have clung convulsively to that small part of the whole which is the short period of this existence of individuals, and have made every effort to ignore the fact that the hold on reality afforded by individual life is no firmer than that of a tuft of grass which one might grab to save himself from being carried away by a wild current. A radical destruction of the “bourgeois” who exist in every man is possible in these disrupted times, more than in any other. In these times, man can find himself again, can really stand in front of himself, and get used to watching everything according to the look of the other shore, so as to restore to importance, to essential significance, what should be so in any normal existence: the relationship between life and the “more than life,” between the human and the eternal, between the short-lived and the incorruptible. And to find ways, over and above mere assertion and gimmickry, for these values to be positively lived and to find forceful expression in the greatest possible number of persons in these hours of trial, is undoubtedly one of the main tasks facing the politico-spiritual élite of our nation. The decline of Heroism War and rearmament in the world of the “Westerners” are once again raising securities. Intensive propaganda, with a crusading tone, using all it’s tried and tested methods, is in the air. Here, we cannot go thoroughly into the concrete questions which concern our specific interests, but rather hint at something more general, one of the inner contradictions of the notion of war, which undermines the foundations of the so-called “West.” The technicist error, of thinking of “war potential” primarily in terms of arms and armaments, special technical-industrial equipment, and the like, and assessing man – according to the brutal expression now widespread in military literature – simply as “human material” – has already been widely criticized. The quality and spirit of the men to whom the arms, the means of offense and destruction, are given, have represented, still represent, and will always represent the basic element of “war potential.” No mobilization will ever be “total” if men whose spirit and vocation are ip to the tests which they must face cannot be created. How are things, in this respect, in the world of the “democracies”? They now want, for the third time this century, to lead humanity to war, in the name of “the war against war.” This requires men to fight at the same time that war as such is criticized. It demands heroes while proclaiming pacifism as the highest ideal. It demands warriors, while it has made “warrior” a synonym for attacker and criminal, since it has reduced the moral basis of “the just war” to that od a large-scale police operations, and it has reduced the meaning of the spirit of combat to that of having to defend oneself as a last resort. The Bourgeois Ideal If one wants a profession of faith from the democratic world, beyond all its pretenses, it is contained in these words. They express the onlycredo, leaving aside mere verbiage and lies, with which it can spiritually equip its army. This means, to rush to the crusade against the Communist threat only out of physical terror, of terror for the skin, for the frightening, wavering ideal of Babbitt, of bourgeois safety, of the “civilization” of the domesticated and standardized human animal, which eats and copulates, and the limits of whose horizon are the Readers Digest, Hollywood, and the sports stadiums. Thus, those who are fundamentally lacking in heroism will seek to awaken warriors for the “defense of the West,” by playing upon the complex of anxiety. Since they have deeply demoralized the true Western soul, since they have debased and demeaned, firstly, the true basis of the State, hierarchy, and virile solidarity, and secondly, the notion of war and combat, they must now play the “trump card” of the anti-Bolshevik crusade. Enough of Illusions Not many illusions can remain concerning the sort of “morality” which can support this endeavor, and which no industrial mobilization, with atomic bombs, flying super-fortresses, supersonic fighters, and so on, can replace. It is with these “trump cards” alone that the “Western world” now stands on the threshold of a possible third world-wide cataclysm, having broken down and insulted everything which had survived from the authentic warrior traditions of Europe and the Far East. In the opposing bloc, there are forces which combine technology with the elemental force of fanaticism, of dark and savage determination, and of the contempt for individual life found among masses which, whether through their own ancient traditions or through the exaltation of the collectivist ideology, hardly value their own existence. This is the tide which will swell forth, not only from the red East but from the whole of a contaminated and unleashed Asia. However, what is really required, to defend “the West” against the sudden rise of these barbaric and elemental forces, is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life. Apart from the military-technical apparatus, the world of the “Westerners” has at its disposal only a limp and shapeless substance – and the cult of the skin, the myth of “safety” and of “war on war,” and the ideal of the long, comfortable, guaranteed, “democratic” existence, which is preferred to the ideal of the fulfillment which can be grasped only on the frontiers between life and death, in the meeting of the essence of living with the extreme of danger. There is nothing else one can say. Perhaps this challenge will constitute the positive side of the game, for especially qualified men, given that game must be accepted and played out anyway. The preponderance of the negative part, of pure destruction, may be frightening, infernal. But no other choice is given to modern man, since he himself is the sole author of the destiny the aspect of which he is now starting to see. This is not the moment to dwell on such prospects. Besides, what we have said does not concern any nation in particular, nor even the present time. It concerns the time when things will become serious, globally, not merely for the interests of the bourgeois, capitalist world, and what those men must know, who, at that point, will still be able to gather in an unshakeable bloc.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 23:17:44 +0000
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