Transcript of “Friends & Enemies” form Dec 7th 2024:
Nyquist: Hi, this is Jeff Nyquist and this is another edition of Friends and Enemies. I’m in the United States. My co-host Alex Benesch is in Germany. We were talking about secret societies, the occult, the influences on politics. It’s a huge subject. We started with talking about Goethe‘s Faust. And of course we’re going to talk about Julius Evola today, how this is influencing the right, how it’s being used, how the Duginists, the people who follow Alexander Dugin are using Evola, how people like Steve Bannon are fascinated by Julius Evola. And maybe you can tell our listeners who Julius Evola was and why he’s important and about some of his books.
Benesch: Well, he certainly brought forward a template and this template has been used by others. It’s sort of a universal template. And so that’s why you can see the same pattern in Dugin’s writings. You can see the same patterns with the German extreme right wing today. You can see it in Austria. You can see it in Britain. You can see it in France. You can see it everywhere.
And of course the Russians have infiltrated this international network very heavily. So in essence, the Russians are building on this network that’s actually fairly old and it’s much bigger than people think because there are many, many front groups. It’s like a funnel and all these ways lead to the same targets. So these right wingers, they need many people who are followers. They play certain parts. They play certain roles. But not everybody is supposed to fully understand this.
As I said, Russia is all over these networks and this network is much more sophisticated than what people can see on the news.
Nyquist: I should add in there that Sufi Islam has a lot of occult magic practices. You have the Kabbalah in Judaism. You have of course Hinduism. You have Chinese Taoism. You have Buddhism of course. So you have all these philosophies which have esoteric or magical occult ideas in them. And then of course you have esoteric Christianity. You’ve got the occult revival in Europe. You’ve got the pagans. And it seems like Dugin has people in all these areas; in the Orthodox Church, in the Catholic Church. They talk about ecumenism. They’re kind of taking Eurasianism and the occult and anti-Americanism together with what they call tradition, which is really—what do they call it? Perennialism. That is, there’s truth in all religions and we’re going to bring all religions together in one. And this is a real movement. This is going on. This is on the Internet. And especially it started years ago in non-English speaking countries. Dugin did not like to take English speakers as students in these online courses, in these groups that he set up. They were educating 20 years ago, 30 years ago, a cadre of people in this kind of soup of occult perennialism mixing religions together. They will talk about something from Islam and then something from the Hindu or Buddhist or then Catholic. They will mix it all together. And it’s really something that’s taking off right now.
Benesch: I see the exact same pattern, the exact same template when I read the manifesto of the Norwegian right-wing terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik. If people remember that. He shot up an island full of teenagers.
And he also attacked the government with a huge bomb.
Nyquist: And he traveled to the former Soviet Union where he had contacts with the secret police.
Benesch: Exactly. The government said he was a lone guy. He was acting as a lone wolf, but there’s so much documented evidence against this. So he cobbled together this very, very large manifesto. And he got these pieces from different authors in different places from different times. But you can always, always tell it is from the same one template. And Brevik’s idea, of course, was to create this pan-European Eurasian empire, a new Roman empire, a pagan empire of sorts. And Breivik was also very fascinated with the aristocracy. He bought some old uniforms. He bought these costumes. I think he even became a Freemason. And there are photos of him in this aristocratic uniform. So whenever you look, it’s always the same thing.
And Julius Evola marketed himself as a nobleman, as a baron. But he really wasn’t. And that’s kind of something we saw in Brevik. We saw that also with the Nazi leadership, they believed in what they called spiritual racism. So that means it’s really nice to have that lineage. If your family goes back hundreds of years, or maybe a thousand years, that’s super cool. But the conviction is what’s important. If you adopt the program, if you believe what this pattern tells you to believe, then you’re in. You’re part of this group and you will have access to this occult power. And there’s this occult plan. So this is a very important aspect of this. So thereby these people are recruiting new members who are not from aristocratic families. You can be a warrior for this plan as a regular guy. Very very important aspect. And so this Julius Evola, he rebelled against his Catholic upbringing, which is something we’ve seen a lot in Europe over many hundreds of years. Same with Adam Weishaupt from the Bavarian Illuminati. Some people say, well, but he had a Catholic upbringing. He was in a Catholic school. Yes, but check out who his mentors were. They were connected to various secret societies. And this is not something that you should misinterpret. They were all rebelling against the church and what they thought of as the system they lived in. So they either complained about the Enlightenment or they complained about the state of traditional empires. They said this was in a state of decay.
Very important aspect in Adolf Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf”. He talks about Austria. And if you’ve ever been to Austria or you watch some videos on YouTube about Vienna, you will see these Roman temples. It’s all over Austria.
The Austrian nobility, they saw themselves as the successors of ancient Rome. But Hitler thought they were becoming too weak. They were becoming too lame. They lost the old ways. Therefore you need a Nazi movement and you need to bring fresh people into this movement using the exact same pattern. Now the books of Evola, they were published in Germany. And even the so-called court magician of the SS, Mr. Willigut, he was a big fan of Julius Evola and he invited him to Berlin.
Nyquist: The SS invited Evola to come and lecture. And he worked with them on this project of gathering this research library on all the occult organizations in Europe, all the Masonic colleges and so on. And that was a project dear to Hitler’s heart. And they were gathering these materials in Italy. And of course, as the American forces threatened to take Rome, Evola fled and they moved the archive up to Vienna where it was captured by the Soviet Union in 1945 by the Red Army.
Benesch: And when you read these books, I mean, obviously they put some stuff in there that’s sometimes partially true, right? They speak in a general sense about the decay and they complain about socialism. They complain about the many problems of democracy in Europe at various times. So they put some stuff in that that is true.
But that’s to be expected of capable propaganda. You need to put some stuff in there that’s true in order to sell the actual program. And that speaks to people. It speaks to conservatives. It speaks to patriots. That’s how these books were constructed.
Now in the First World War, Evola served as an artillery officer. And this experience or this whole deal had a great influence on him. Same with Hitler. Hitler fought in the First World War. And afterwards, he was kind of insane for a while. I mean, clinically insane as documented by the doctors that treated him. Same with people from my family. Now I’ve shown the pictures before on this show, some old family pictures. This was my father’s uncle and he’s got his own Wikipedia page now. He was Theo Benesch. He was leading the NSDAP party in Bavaria. He was also a young kid in World War I. And he came back and he was kind of nuts. And then he discovered the propaganda, the books, the conspiracy stuff, the big plan.
So that’s how they all got into this. Julius Evola, he was probably a bit out of his mind, depressed and scared of the future. So he experimented with hallucinogenic drugs and magic. And he talks about how this was very dangerous for him. So this almost ended his career or his life. He was suicidal.
He was talking about the contemporary dark age, the Kali Yuga. So we’re in this bad era, this bad materialistic era.
Nyquist: The Kali Yuga is an Indian concept of these ages. That there are golden ages and then there’s the Kali Yuga.
And we are in the Kali Yuga is a period where people have a lot of technology and a lot of wealth, material wealth, but they’re spiritually impoverished. And this is in his book, Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola has the re-publishes the old Hindu prophecy about the Kali Yuga, which is rather remarkable because it does seem to describe our era.
And this is worth reading because it’s so astonishingly parallels our time. And this is what moved some of these people to think like this.
This is from the Vishnu Puranya.
And outcasts and barbarians will be the masters of the banks of the Indus, Darvika and Chandrabhaga and the Kashmir. These will be the contemporary rulers of this age, reigning over the earth, kings of violent temper. They will seize upon the property of their subjects. They will be of limited power and will for the most part rapidly rise and fall. Their lives will be short, their desires insatiable, and they will display little piety. The people of various countries will follow their example. The prevailing caste will be the Shudra.
Vaseyas will abandon agriculture and commerce and gain a livelihood by servitude or the exercise of mechanical arts. And he puts in brackets, “proletarianization and industrialization.” And of course, he’s talking about the different castes in India.
The Kishyatrias, instead of protecting, will plunder their subjects. And under the pretext of loving customs will rob merchants of their property.
Wealth and piety will decrease day by day until the whole world will be wholly depraved. Then property alone will confer rank. Well, we see that now.
Wealth, material wealth, will be the only source of devotion. Passion will be the sole bond of union between the sexes. Falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation.
Earth will be venerated, but for its mineral treasures, exploitation of the soil, demise of the cult of the earth. And it goes on. And it’s very, it kind of reminds you of modern civilization.
So, and that’s why he in “A revolt against the modern world”, he’s saying, “There’s something wrong with modern civilization.” And he goes back to the pattern of pagan Rome. And he talks about perhaps the most valid concept he has is that in all ancient societies, you have the priest who’s talking to God.
Under him, you have the king and the warrior caste. And then you have the merchant class, and then you have the proletariat and the peasants at the bottom. And of course, the slaves at the very bottom. Well, what he says in here is that we have, it’s the inversion of the orders. Now we want the lowest on top, and the people who are spiritual are at the very bottom. They’re not wanted. And the warrior caste is below the merchant caste. So they’re just bureaucrats who work for the army.
And so what he says is this basic idea of rank order has been inverted. There is some truth to that in terms of traditional society.
So this is why he talks about tradition. But of course, what’s odd is that Evola doesn’t really believe in it a real former belief system or tradition. His belief is a kind of modern rendering of, in abstract terms, what traditional society is.
Benesch: Yeah, because he’s not an aristocrat, because he does not have the so-called birthright. He does not have the lineage, but he still wants the power. He still wants the influence. He wants to be in a higher place in this hierarchy.
And he thinks that his convictions earn him that place. And as I mentioned, this is what Hitler believed. This is what other Nazis believed. And when the British visited the Nazis early on, the British were appalled. They were saying, who are these people? Where do they come from?
Nyquist: Evola’s very bizarre ideas of mixing things. If you are meditating on ancient Indian society under the Aryans or ancient Egypt, or imagine yourself in the mystery schools in Greece or ancient Rome, you’re trying to recreate a world that you imagine is better than the world you’re living in now.
And so when he says revolt against the modern world, he’s really rejecting what is. And he’s imagining what could come again. And of course, Nietzsche very comically wrote, “We’re not free to be a crab that walks backwards. We can’t go back. There’s only going further and further into decadence,” is what Nietzsche wrote. We have to play out the hand that we’ve been dealt, and that leads somewhere. In history, although in general there are these patterns that repeat, there’s a lot of new things in history. Things don’t happen. History repeats. Well, it really only rhymes.
But these people, they really think that they can somehow change the world. Evola, for example, when Mussolini was rescued by Otto Skorzeny, the SS commando from captivity and some kind of chateau in the mountains in Italy, of course, all the prominent Italian intellectuals and whatnot were summoned to Hitler’s headquarters.
What was it? The Wolfslayer, the Wolfschanze, right? The Wolfslayer. And he was there, and he was arguing for a monarchy because he believed in monarchy and with a kind of priest-king, I guess, if you read his books. And of course, Hitler was like, “No, we’re going to make a republic.” So Mussolini in the latter part of the war, when they formed this North Italian republic, Evola was just brokenhearted that they didn’t make a monarchy. Of course, when King Victor Emmanuel of Italy had gne over to the Allies, where are you going to get a king? For some, you’re going to make some new kingdom out of whole cloth. Where’s the tradition? That’s kind of weird. It’s like a contradiction.
Benesch: Yeah, and also this pragmatism that you just described when things just don’t go Mr. Evola’s way. So for example, King Victor Emmanuel, he was related to, I think, the Brits. He was related to some other significant European noble lines. And those who unified Italy, Mazzini and Garibaldi, were also tied into these secret societies. I mean history is not necessarily the way people like it to be. Evola is using a lot of historical arguments, which is very common in these ideological cults. They say the past was such and such. This is why we now have to do this, that and the other.
Nyquist: They turn the past into a formula. If you read Evola, you see he turns the past into like a formula that has this geometry or this algebra. And if you just repeat that, you’re going to magically, poof, create something new.
The problem is, is that like a lot of these Italian fascists who joined with the Axis in World War II, none of their thinking ever could be brought out practically in reality. It just ended up being this bloody massacre where the Italian regime and the Nazi regime did very bad things.
Benesch: If you look at the the German National Museum, you see many pieces of historical art, you see that blend of the Roman, the German and even the Nordic, the Scandinavian. You can almost draw a vertical line through Europe. And this is kind of what happened after the end of the Western Roman Empire. You can’t have history as neat and tidy as you want it to be. But Evola, he probably wants to change history. He wants to magically say this is what history was and people believe him. That’s then reality.
And, if you want to be an occultist, if you want the entities to pay attention to you, you have to impress them. And before you have any significant power, you need to perform smaller acts of insanity and evil to be in contact with the entities. So, for example, Evola advocated that people followed the left hand path, use dark, violent sexual powers against the modern world. For Evola, these virile heroes are both generous and cruel. They possess the ability to rule and commit Dionysian acts. Now, that sounds very Dugan to me. What else are these people going to do before they have extreme power, before they can kill a bunch of people, before they can make many people suffer, they have to do these smaller acts of evil in an occult sense, and interpret that in an occult sense. Now, Evola was not some lone nut, not not by any stretch of the imagination. So, for example, one of his main contacts was Arturo Regini. He was an initiate in the Memphis rite, a brand of Freemasonry. Now, regular masons will say that’s irregular. We’ve got nothing to do with that. Fair enough. But still, even regular masons are also attracted to the ancient world. And it’s also Egyptian influences in in regular masonry. It’s not just the Memphis Misraim rite, to be precise.
Nyquist: And of course, this is where hermeticism comes in. But we don’t really know that for sure. There has been some recent discoveries that that have caused people to go back and look at the hermetic texts and say, yeah, there probably are based on older things that are from Egypt now. This is changing. But whatever the case, the fragments that we have, these guys are imagining
or trying to reimagine a religion that’s been that’s from a dead language that nobody speaks anymore. To create something that I think really is probably new and and weird. And people are drawn to that today.
Benesch: And if you want to make historical arguments, you have to be an expert in history. And few people are, especially when it’s old history, which is hard to reconstruct, especially the intelligence level or the occult level of the past. So in science, we’ve made some great progress with the scientific method. We looked at things and oftentimes these things that we looked at contradicted what we had thought so far. So we get surprised and surprises are oftentimes useful to make progress. But, you know, somebody like Evola or Dugin or all these other guys that are using the same pattern, the same template, they don’t want to be surprised. They don’t want anything to disturb their interpretation of everything. And this is where this spiritual racism comes in. If you don’t follow the program, if you’re not on board with the program, they will not just hate you. They will mix it in with a traditional conspiracy ideology. They will say that you are in a Jewish spirit or that you are “Jewish”. This is kind of their logic.
Nyquist: The author E. Michael Jones is a very bright guy. “The Jewish revolutionary spirit and its impact on world history”. This book is crazy. He’s got that anti Semitic obsession that the Jews are really the central problem. And of course, he comes from a very strange, very old Catholic point of view that the Jews are the murderers of Christ and that their revolt against God is the core revolt of all history.
It’s very strange. He has gone to Iran, for example, and been involved with anti Semitic conferences there. He has been involved with Duginites and the whole Dugin thing. He takes a pro Russian approach in the Ukrainian-Russian war.
He is one of the people on this. And again, it’s so strange, although Evola says maybe Catholicism could reconstitute traditional order. He actually says that in some place in the “revolt of the modern world”. But he’s largely he’s pagan. But yet this guy Jones is Catholic. And then you’ve got, you know, Sufis, Muslims who are into this who are who basically become Duginites and, of course, Hindus and and Jews. There’s Kabbalists that actually Jews that are into a kind of Jewish version of a kind of mystery school right wing. Yeah, because there these traditions and Jewish mysticism. A lot of these people are perennialists. That is that they will do. There was a book. What was it? It was the perennial philosophy written by Huxley. Gosh, that must have been 60, 70 years ago.
It’s an interesting book. It’s about it’s largely about Buddhist and Catholic spiritual practices and similarities in the teachings, saying that there’s this core teaching about the soul and the spirit and about the what is God different way of talking about God. Buddhists are kind of an atheistic religion where they don’t have God. But he tries to make the argument that they’re talking about the same experience of the divine. They’re just talking about it in a different way. So this is evolved. This idea of perennialism has evolved through these people. And it’s been politicized so that where if you read Huxley, there’s no ideal ideology. There’s nothing ideological in Huxley. He wrote Brave New World famously, as those people would remember, which is a very romantic attack on modern totalitarianism and rationalist politics. But Dugin, it’s interesting and the Eurasianists and this Russian controlled movement, they want to politicize perennialism. They want to politicize all religions.
And they want to create this super state, this Eurasian estate, they want to be able to include Nazis and Jews and anti-Semites and Jews, Hindus and Catholics, Buddhists and Muslims. They want to be able to include everybody, which is, if you think about it, it’s kind of Russian because the Russian empire had all these religious groups in it. They had Muslims in the South.
They had Buddhists in the East. Of course, there was the Christians in the West and even Catholics in Ukraine. So it’s a funny project.
Benesch: Yeah, it’s a funnel. I always compare it to a marketing funnel. You can enter the funnel at any specific point, but over time you will end up in the same direction. Now, I’ve been called a Jew, even though I come from a prominent Nazi family, so that makes no sense at all. But these extremists don’t care because they go by this Evola logic. If you’re not on board with their program, you are part of this satanic Jewish revolutionary conspiracy. If we look at some of these people that Evola ran with, hung out with, if you look at Mazzini and Garibaldi who unified Italy, and we look at their Masonic contacts all over Europe, I mean, these old nobility circles who were also very into the ancient mystery schools, these circles, they perfected the revolutionary game, the intelligence techniques. So they played the revolutionary game. It’s not a Jewish invention at all. This is a silly idea to say that everything was classic imperialism, and then came the Jews, and then all these revolutions started. It’s ridiculous. I mean, anybody who knows anything about the intelligence world and intelligence techniques should be able to look at this and make sense of it. Because I always tell these conspiracy guys: Please tell me what special techniques these Jews supposedly had. What magic special intelligence techniques did they invent or did better than anybody else at the time? And then they hemm and haw and say, well, they had a courier system. They were funneling information with couriers, and they had pigeons that transported letters, and stuff like that. I’m thinking, you don’t have any significant answer to this question. You don’t know. You can’t point to any specific techniques invented or perfected by Jews that they did better than anybody else. This guy that Evola was hanging out with, his most important contact, as far as we know, Ebola’s contact, Arturo Regini, was not just a member of the Memphis Misraim rite of Freemasonry. This guy was also admitted to the regular Scottish right Masonic lodge called Lucifero in Florence, affiliated to the Grand Orient of Italy. Now, when we look at Scottish masonry, it’s as far as we can tell really older than English masonry.
And this gets into a whole interesting bit in history. These people used intelligence techniques. You know, they got into Denmark, they got into Scotland, and they got into England. They played a revolutionary game. This is just the intelligence game. It’s just intelligence techniques. And it’s for political power. Yeah, so don’t think for a minute, you can follow the simplistic Julius Evola logic. Everything was warriors and kings and paganism, and then came the Jews and democracy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s so simplistic. It appeals to people who are looking for these easy answers.
Nyquist: What Dugan has done is he’s brought in these modern things that come out of Marxism, like deconstructionism. I remember I had to sit through a lecture of Jacques Derrida at UC Irvine.
What was it, 35 years ago or 37 years ago?
And so what deconstructionism does is it basically deconstructs all the structures in our world that make up our complex civilization. All are structures of the mind. They’re ideas, ideals, they’re understandings, very deep things that have been evolved through folkways through thousands of years and through trial and error and through the institutions that we have arrived at. And of course, to deconstruct everything is, in a way, the same thing the Marxists want to do in their revolution is to level, is to destroy, and then to rebuild, to make the world new. And what Duginism does, this is from a brilliant book on Dugin, Charles Upton’s, Dugin against Dugin. And Upton, of course, is a Sufist came out of the beatnik generation in the 1960s out of the Bay Area. And he discovers God and he decides that there’s a lot of evil out here and that this political ideology stuff is wrong. And so he’s looking at Dugin and he’s a traditionalist and he says, “Alexander Dugan draws his metaphysical perspective more directly from the works of Martin Heidegger than from any other source.” René Guinan, we haven’t mentioned him. Evola was sort of the Italian rendering of Guinan, who is French, who started this sort of perennialist esotericism. Martin Heidegger was a pro-Hitler, a philosopher, very significant German philosopher, who was also against metaphysics. And this is the point that he says, the fact that it makes sense that Dugin would use Heidegger because Heidegger is really a deconstructionist, is what Upton argues. This is unfortunate since Heidegger was not a metaphysician, but rather an obscure, ambiguous, tortured deconstructionist of everything that the word metaphysics had represented before he got his hands on it. I challenge anyone who has read with sufficient comprehension two pages of the Dao De Jing or Meister Eckhart to then try to go back and read Martin Heidegger without a sensation of terminal barrenness comparable to being abandoned in the bed of a dry salt lake on a cold, gray winter day. The thing is that Dugin’s spirituality is empty.
There’s a nihilism here. And you will hear people who like to study these things saying, it’s all turned into political ideology.
Benesch: Yeah. It’s a means to an end. Somebody put together this template that Dugan is now also using, and this template was created for specific purposes, and that’s how it was constructed. They want you to play a part in their plan. They want to use you for their plan. And you’re not supposed to know what the actual objectives are. And they don’t want you to know what your true place in the future will be in this future hierarchy, which they are creating. And they like to go after average people, people who are frustrated with the way things are. And of course people get frustrated. This is a very important aspect, but you have to ask yourself, how can you make sense of things? How can you make yourself more useful? How can you make yourself more productive and change your position and change the impact that you have? Now, in this Evola logic, it’s all very simple, right? It says here, “Evola frequently used the term Aryan to refer to the nobility, not the average dude out there, not the average white guy.” This is a very important distinction. Evola was using this term Aryan in a specific way. He referred to the nobility, not the average white guy. Evola wrote the foreword and an essay in the second Italian edition of the fake protocols of the elders of Zion published in 1938 by the Catholic fascist Giovanni Preciosi. And so they created this spiritual meta-anti-Semitism. Evola said, “A person can be Aryan but have a Jewish soul, and a person can be Jewish but have an Aryan soul.” This is exactly what you just described, like a few minutes ago. They will recruit Jewish people for their plan if they follow along with the program. But if you were a white guy, even if you come from a Nazi family, even if you have blue eyes or blue green eyes, they will still call you a Jew or somebody with a Jewish soul if you don’t follow along their plan, if you won’t help them with their insane plan and their insane ideas.
Now, there’s a new edition out, actually from this year. A new translation of “Pagan Imperialism” by Julius Evola. And they say it’s a better translation, they say the appendices have finally been added, and there’s context and notes and all that stuff. As every book of his, this is a condemnation against the modern world. And he means by that, to a large degree, the enlightenment, new things. And some of the things that have turned out to be very useful for the average person, very, very healthy.
But this is his big, big accusation. It says here, “Evola views Christianity as a weakening force that has replaced the proud, heroic spirit of paganism with submission and servitude to an alien deity. He envisions a revival of an empire built on the blood and fire of ancient rites where the ruler embodies divine authority and the sacred aura is restored.” Now, do people really believe, let’s say, Vladimir Putin is a god, he’s a god king? He’s a heroic figure? He’s just a guy. A KGB bureaucrat. He’s just a dude, right? And his health is failing and he’s done some significant KGB work, but it’s not too different from many others that have served in the KGB.
And Putin is lacking essential skills of being a ruler. He’s lacking skills that certain kings possessed or an understanding of certain things or a competence in many things.
Nyquist: He seems to lack a genuine empathy for his own people. This is the thing about Ebola and formulas: Is the formula true? It has this sound. It rounds things out. The world seems to make sense with it, but it’s not true. There’s no love in it. There’s no beauty in it. There’s nothing noble in it. He talks about nobility all the time. Where is the nobility in an empire where you’re crushing people? And where you’re crushing people for what? Some empty notion of four ages and you’re going to get through the Kali Yuga faster. This is almost the historicism of Marx, place in other terms. It’s very cold. It’s very cruel and there’s a lust for power embedded in it. And you will always find this with it. Where is the love? Where is the creation of something that’s organic? He likes to talk about initiation, but who initiated him?
Where is this initiation? Where is this grace from God that he has? Or any of these people. He supported Mussolini and Hitler? Where’s grace in that? And then after the war, to be bitter and to be preaching this stuff, there’s no grace.
Benesch: People started to glorify Adolf Hitler, and even in later decades, people glorified Hitler, even though Hitler was just a guy and Hitler could have lost the war in so many different ways. He lost the intelligence game. He was out-produced by the Americans because there was freedom in America and people got decent wages and America was out-innovating the Germans. What we talked about in last episode, this insane occult logic of Hitler and also the communists, when they tried to communicate with entities by creating death and misery and destruction, so the entities would notice you and they wanted to be wasteful because gods can be wasteful because the universe can seem wasteful. And so, wastefulness is a symbol of power.
Nyquist: Evola wrote books like “A Revolt Against the Modern World” and “Pagan Imperialism”. He wrote mainly books about the occult, about I think, alchemy and tarot and magic.
Ancient magical thinking or coming from ancient Egypt hermeticism, it’s based on an alchemy. It’s based on the correspondences of ideas and symbols.
And these correspondences, there’s a reality there. I think Carl Jung’s psychology shows that you do dream association. Things are related to each other, ideas. There’s some truth in Plato and Platonism. But what they’ve done is they’ve taken it and they’re trying to use these things, they’re trying to weaponize them to use Platonism, to use the occult, to use hermeticism, to build a political, I guess you could say a Tower of Babel or a political ladder to heaven.
And this is really dangerous because whether you’re a Marxist doing it intellectually or you’re a Nazi doing it with some kind of secret SS rites or you’re Evola and these Italian masons trying to bolster the Mussolini regime, it’s just a bunch of murderous gangs trying to justify themselves using hocus pocus, right?
Benesch: When you see the advertising for this new 2024 edition of Evola’s book, Pagan Imperialism, it says this, “Pagan imperialism is a provocative manifesto for those who dream of a return to a world rooted in the fierce esoteric traditions of the past.” And if it gives you these simplistic ideas and thinking patterns, obviously it’s a trap. Now, we all know that you can mobilize masses of people who are uneducated or less educated or have serious gaps in their education, but don’t believe for a minute that if you follow these people into this trap, that it’s going to go well for you. I mean, it didn’t go well for so many people who became part of Nazism or communism. And this new edition of Julius Evola’s book, Pagan Imperialism, that just happened to be released this year, is a brand new translation by Heinrich Matterhorn, combining the original 1928 edition with the 1933 German edition, the Nazi era edition. It also includes Evola’s extensive appendix. This edition is significantly longer than previous English translations and is enriched, as they call it, with detailed footnotes that provide definitions as well as commentary on different concepts and ideas mentioned in the text. Now, of course, there’s variations of this kind of propaganda. Some variations of this are even more reduced, more simple. But what I see with this new right wing, this pro-Russian right wing, they want to appeal to some of these slightly more educated, slightly more clever people, and they make it sound more clever. But it’s still the same simplistic template. It’s still the same old easy primitive trap. And it says in the book: Pan-European unity based on pagan imperialism. Evola disliked the US and USSR.
Nyquist: I think he had a very special hatred of the United States.
Benesch: Yeah, even though there’s some Roman roots in America, we all saw what the Americans were capable of, not just outproducing the Nazis, but also out-innovating and creating a better life for many, many people. But he hated the US.
Nyquist: Freedom, the idea of a republic that brings freedom to people and that allows this incredible creativity. And people like Evola, these fascists, they don’t understand the importance of checks and balances, the importance of how power corrupts, as Lord Acton had said, absolutely.
Benesch: Because he’s never led anything. He’s never built anything substantial. He’s never led anything. He’s never seen what can go wrong and what you need to pay attention to.
Nyquist: He saw what went wrong during the Third Reich and in the Axis, and yet he claimed that they were the side that should have won.
Benesch: These neo-Nazis are a much bigger movement now than people can ever imagine. That’s why we’re talking about this. And the Russians are also in on it. The Russians are also behind it. Evola doesn’t really talk about the occult core of the USSR.
And also, Rome. Let’s look at Rome for a second. Rome was highly dependent on money and trade, the numbers game. How many troops can you pay, train, and equip? If the calculation of Rome fails, Rome fails. So how can he come up with this stupid conspiracy argument that the Jewish spirit of trade and merchants and peaceful exchange ruined everything?
Nyquist: How could the Italian Navy compete with the British Navy? The British Navy basically just sunk it.
Benesch: We know so much more now about ancient Rome, because they were really cagey with their numbers, right? There’s not that many actual numbers that we get. What cost what? Right? Because they had to keep numbers oftentimes secret, because if the enemy got wind of the actual numbers of the Roman Empire, that would be dangerous. Because Rome had to squeeze the peasants to pay for the soldiers to be able to defend the Roman Empire. But Rome also used trade to expand its power. It wasn’t all just bloodshed and magic, you know, esoteric, fierce power and killing people all the time. There was trade. And this was an integral part of the Roman system. So how can you make that argument that, oh, modern trade, this and that, and the British Empire, they had banks and the British Empire, they had an international trade dimension to it, and this was all Jewish decay, blah, blah, blah. It makes no sense whatsoever.
And there’s a lot of talk about tradition, but who is a true expert on post-Roman empires in Europe, especially the reconstruction of the intelligence level, the networks, the reconstruction of the occult that went on in Europe, after the end of the Western Roman Empire. So was Evola an expert? Did he want to be an expert? He wanted to be an occultist. He didn’t want to really get into history. This is something this is very, very different. Evola talks about the rebellion of the old nobility against the modern world. Well, I hate to break it to people, but the old nobility built significant parts of the modern world, especially the banking system, internationalism. This is it’s not what he thinks it was. Some of these old these old nobility networks were really powerful. They were much bigger than people imagine. And it’s documented how big they were in terms of members. And now we understand better the intelligence capabilities of these old networks and oftentimes these old networks were really, really big fans of the ancient mystery schools. So it’s not like Jews invented banking. Jews invented a central bank. Jews invented the merchant banks. No, they didn’t.
Nyquist: Look at the Medicis. Medicis were, you know, Italians.
Benesch: And this whole stupid Rothschild fairy tale mythology. They took over Britain. They didn’t. They didn’t. They were recruited. The first Rothschild was recruited by the Landgraf of Hessen Kassel, who was related to the British throne. Very old family cluster. They needed some people to run certain aspects of the operation that that means the Rothschilds, they probably didn’t really own any of it. They were supposed to run it, keep it in this tight family for a few generations, serve this purpose, not a Jewish invention. And and all this crazy fairy tale nonsense about the the Battle of Waterloo and the Rothschilds scamming the the stock market. Absolutely completely false. Not true at all. Absolutely not true. If the Rothschilds had misbehaved in Britain, that would have been the end of them. Absolutely the end of them. So “Pagan imperialism” was published in Germany in 1933. So the beginning of the Nazi empire in the Armanen Publishing house. Evols traveled to Berlin in 1934 and addressed the German aristocracy in Heinrich von Gleichen’s gentleman’s club.
Now this this interesting guy, Mr. von Gleichen, he was creating a whole network in various cities. They called themselves rings and they were copying British clubs and they were copying English masonry.
And this was a very interesting club because its members became very powerful, very, very powerful in Germany, for example, Heinrich Brüning and Franz von Poppen. Franz von Papen, he was the vice chancellor in 1932. Wilhelm von Geil, also a member of this Ring Club, he became the minister of the interior in 1932. So this was not a little gentleman’s club. This was not just a little hobby Masonic lodge. These guys were serious. And so this is the club that was hooking up with Julius Evola. And the guy who’s running this network, this Ring Club, Mr. von Gleichen. This is a very old family, goes back a couple of hundred years.
They call themselves “Ur-alt”. Now, Evola and his friends and his partners, they even created a club that’s called “Ur”. This is a very old word. In essence, it means “very”. Okay. So “very old” means “Ur-alt”. But there’s also a subtext meaning. It’s kind of a mythical, magical subtext meaning. If something is “Ur”, it’s kind of mysterious. And not just old, but mysterious. Right. It’s grand. It’s mysterious and dark.
So this nobility guy, Mr. von Gleichen, his family was friends with Friedrich von Schiller. Probably the second most famous German author of all times. It was Goethe, which we talked about in the last episode, and it was Schiller. And so this von Gleichen aristocrat, he was very, very close to Mr. Schiller. And of course, Schiller and Goethe both were tied into the Illuminati of Bavaria and these German Masonic lodges. Very creepy. And so, Evola influenced the so-called court magician of the SS, Karl-Maria Willigut. Willigut became SS-Oberführer and SS-Brigadeführer. Willigud was so happy about Evola, he even wrote to Heinrich Himmler and said, “You got to check out this guy. This guy is terrific.”
That’s who these guys were. And Evola hates, for the most part, Semites, even though in Mesopotamia we had large empires, pagan empires, or occult empires even. So how can you make that east-west distinction and say, “Well, the Western empires, like the Romans, they were the good ones, the cool ones, but then came the Jewish influence, the Semitic influence, and ruined us in the west.” How can you make that distinction? That makes absolutely no historic sense whatsoever.
Nyquist: He’s trying to fit in with his SS buddies. He was supposed to make them happy. One of the things Himmler was charged with was creating a new religion. And this is what his Finnish doctor said. He had the library car on his personal train filled with religious books. And Himmler admitted to this doctor, that he was tasked by the Fuhrer with creating a new religion. And we find that Dugin now is in this same kind of role vis-a-vis Putin and all of these perennialists. And in fact, Dugan has actually proclaimed that Eurasianism is a religion. Did you know that? And so he’s explicitly declared it as a religion. And Upton quotes Father Seraphim Rose, who wrote a great book on nihilism, by the way. Father Seraphim Rose was from the, I think, the Bay Area. He was an Eastern Orthodox Christian priest.
And he said that on looking at these developments in the 1960s, 50s, and 60s, he said, Satan has walked into the modern world naked. He’s just a Christian priest. He’s a modern world naked. He’s just come right in. And people are embracing Satan. What is a disguised form of Satanism?
And I think when you look at Dugan, this is a tempting answer to what he’s doing. Because there’s something evil, something wicked, and there’s an inappropriate pursuit of power and empire taking place here.
Benesch: I see people treat it as a religion. It’s amazing how it gives them purpose, it gives them community, it gives them drive and hope and a place, and it gives them a whole false history, and it gives them everything they crave. People especially in Europe, they treat it like a religion so much. And I was surprised to see how fast this gained traction in the US, because the US is in many ways different than Europe.
I was hoping for a better defense against this stuff. Because why would Americans go back to this insanity that was happening all over Europe? Because we had these competing aristocrats. They all wanted to be Rome. They all claimed to be the new Rome, the successor of Rome. And they tried to outdo each other. And this nobility that Evola is talking about, parts of it, especially some of these German clusters, these post-Roman German clusters of nobility, some of them, they actually tried to subvert and control the Enlightenment. This is a significant aspect of history that almost nobody has ever tried to look at. It’s not like old empires, everything was great, then came the Jewish spirit, then everything became miserable in democracies and blah, blah, blah. These nobility guys, especially these German kings or German-based kings in Britain, they were not sitting by, they were not letting the Rothschilds take over Britain. They were not going to let everything slip away. They tried as hard as they could to subvert the Enlightenment in Europe, tried to control it as much as they can. And of course, these structures that were created, the new British banking system, the bond market, this internationalism of the British Empire, that system created many losers. And so it was clear that these so-called losers of the system would become angry and they would rebel. And guess what happens? The same nobility networks, they tried also to control that rebellious spirit. So they would control both sides of this political argument, both sides of this political battle. So there was a lot of fake pseudo-rebellion against the Enlightenment. So you control parts of the Enlightenment, you control parts of the anti-Enlightenment. This is how the game is played. You don’t wait around until the rebellion happens. You want to be on top of it as early as you can.
And this is something that either Evola was not aware of or he was not saying it because it was not useful to him and his people to say it. They needed this rebellion. They wanted to have it and use it.
Now, I have this new translation here in front of me. And it says this.
“Bodying simultaneously the power of strength and the light of the spirit in a unique being, one that truly acts on behalf of an entire lineage and at the same time transcends everything conditioned by earth and blood.” I mean, this is PR talk. I mean, how many buzzwords can you possibly put into a sentence?
Nyquist: That’s when you know you’re being manipulated when you hear these different things. Look, when you talk about Evola’s being a kind of magician who Mussolini was afraid of, who would go to Hitler’s headquarters and give advice, you’re talking about a person who exercised some influence, who had some importance, who then tried to leave these books behind. You know, I think he died in the 1970s. Tried to leave this legacy and you’ve got Dugin trying to revive it. And of course, Evola’s a pagan. Dugan claims to be an Orthodox Christian. He’s got followers who like Kabbalah and study Judaism. He’s got followers who are Sufis and into Islam. But yet, by his associations, he is really spitting on Christianity. He is spitting on Judaism. He is spitting on Islam in reality. And of course, this goes to the death of his daughter.
Dugan is really very offensive in his manipulations to people who seriously believe in certain things.
Was it the Putinists that killed his daughter as to create a martyr, to energize people? Was it angry Muslims who were upset that Dugan had been trying to trick them into this perennialism? Or was it some other angry group that had seen through his deception?
These are questions I don’t know the answer to. But you can’t manipulate people in favor of a very nasty empire like Russia, the Russian Federation, with a dictator who is murdering people, selectively assassinating people. And you could read “From Russia with blood”. You could read about the assassination of Anna Polikovskaya or Alexander Litvinenko. And there’s hundreds of others. Ordered assassinations. And then the massacre of the Ukrainians and the kidnapping of 20,000 Ukrainian children.
And this is being proposed in the same breath that this is sacred, this is truth, this is deep philosophical understanding.
And people fall for this?
Benesch: I mean, this guy’s understanding of war and empire, it seems to be stuck somewhere in the distant past when armies were 300,000 people and 50,000 horses. Or sometimes even smaller when you couldn’t use your whole force at the same time. When you had to split it up and you had 20,000 soldiers there and 30,000 over there and 50,000 over there.
Things were simpler back then. And you cannot use this old, simplistic understanding in the modern age when we have weapons of mass destruction, when we have armies that are millions of people and we have new technology to kill people and biological weapons and other types of weapons. You can’t use an outdated concept like this in a wrong way.
Nyquist: Well, there is a devaluation just like in Karl Marx and just like in Hitler, there’s a devaluation of logic in what Dugan and Evola are doing. They’ve got to get you to devalue logic that is your own rational mind and understanding it. If they can get you there, and I talked about this technique last week, the cognitive dissonance is an actual communist technique.
If they can get you to believe things that are completely impossible, then they can get you to do anything, to accept anything, to be a part of any crime, basically. Because your ability then to judge has broken down completely. And this is a form of mind control. It’s actually a technique. And I think that it’s employed when I was advising in the debate that Alavo de Carvalho had with Dugin years ago, I gave him advice. I told Alavo, “Don’t treat Dugin like a real philosopher.”
He’s not sincere. He’s not really doing philosophy. He’s not doing what Socrates did by questioning, honestly questioning. He’s not doing what Plato or Aristotle did. He’s not a philosopher. He’s a propagandist for an empire. He’s manipulating. He’s using mind control techniques. So you have to treat him like what he is.
And I think that that’s what we have to do with a lot of this stuff is that they are attempting to create an ideology, which is false, in which it’s all about power and it’s about getting self-affirmation. Just like Eric Voegelin said, self-affirmation or a sense of identity for murdering or killing other people, trampling them down.
That’s what’s really at the essence of all this, whether it’s Nazism, communism, Evolaism, paganism, in these forms, these formulas.
And anybody can take, by the way, a religion and they can twist it into a cult. They can change it and make it a political instrument.
Benesch: And they love paradoxes. They love paradoxical things. They get really giddy when something seems paradoxical or sounds paradoxical.
Nyquist: And that is exactly, you know, and you talk about dialectics in Marxism, but that’s exactly what cognitive dissonance does.
Benesch: Yeah, because normally when you encounter something paradoxical in science, be it historical science, political science, whatever science, you encounter something paradoxical or it seems paradoxical. It means that maybe you’ve made a mistake. You know, somewhere there is a mistake. You have to rectify that error and then it makes sense. It’s not paradoxical anymore. Or you haven’t really understood the complexities of the issues yet. It may seem paradoxical to you now, but the more you get into it, the seeming paradox will vanish at some point.
Nyquist: But just a good example is a good example of this is Evola’s teaching on Eurasianism. He says, truly, Eurasianism turns out to be that moment when you implement the unpleasant command of a leader exercising your own whim.
And when the command corresponds with your whim, your wishes with the movement of your soul, that is true Eurasianism when absolute freedom merges into the inseparable synthesis with absolute discipline.
Benesch: Oh, come on. I mean, this is this is this is O’Brien. This is O’Brien in Orwell’s 1984 saying, if I tell you I can fly in this room, I can fly in this room because I will torture you to the point where you believe it. And two plus two equals five.
Nyquist: We can make up anything. And how many fingers am I holding up? Right. And there’s a rat going to eat your eyeball out if you don’t tell me the wrong number. This is O’Brien.
Benesch: Evola is talking about liberty or freedom and his own definition of the word. It says as strange as it may seem (he means as paradoxical as it may seem) the foundation of our imperialism includes values that also appear to appear to underpin the liberal forms of democracy. The difference lies in the fact that in liberalism, these values are asserted by a race of slaves who do not dare to think them through to the fullest extent for and within the individual, but instead illegitimately and egalitarianly transfer them to society and humanity. In doing so, they lose their original meaning and transform into errors. According to their first immortal principle, they claim to have ushered in the era of liberty. In reality, it is nothing. They do not understand what liberty means. If they did, they would also understand that to desire liberty is to desire the empire. Liberty does not tolerate compromises. It must be fully affirmed or not at all. What? I mean, they want to totally control you and call that liberty.
Nyquist: You look at George Orwell when his future English socialist state, its freedom is slavery.
Freedom is slavery. And of course, the ministry of truth is full of lies. And so these contradictions become necessary for the sake of power. What’s really dangerous when government or media or any major institution is saying the opposite of the truth. When there’s no correspondence between what they say in the truth or less and less correspondence, you’re heading into slavery. You’re heading into a very dangerous place because we need the truth to be free. Right. You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free. They’re giving you lies. They’re trying to enslave you. And they’re telling you that the lies are the real freedom and that that the empire, this totalitarian entity is the ultimate freedom and the and the truth at the same time.
Benesch: It goes on like this. It says an empire must then be conceived according to the indicated analogy of a unified body synthesized by a soul. The unity that such a body achieves, unlike that of a brute, is a higher principle that has an end in itself. It does not live for the needs of the body, but rather has the body as an instrument. It is not produced by the body, but vice versa, in the sense that the soul is the end. The profound organizing principle of the body itself.
But wait a minute. Why did why did the United States out-produce the Nazis and all the other nations combined that had entered World War Two? Why was America successful? Why were people in America so much happier and productive in America without innovating everybody else? According to his logic, it should have been the other way around. Fascism should have been like this super mega successful thing and everything works as a body and a soul, blah, blah, blah. And America should have been failing. But that’s not what happened.
So that’s, of course, an actual reality. Reality is contradicting what he’s saying. But neo-Nazis and Eurasianists to this day, they still use the same old excuse. They say, well, Hitler lost because it wasn’t fascist enough, because the Nazis were not enough of a soul and a body and the Jewish spirit kind of was still in the world and blah, blah, blah.
Nyquist: America is with its many churches is more religious to this day than Europe or any of these people. Their religion is a fake. And so they don’t have any real spirituality. And I we’ve run out of time. Alex, did you have any last comments?
Benesch: Well, there’s there’s so many books that this guy put out and some of them are more practical in a sense. They have the handbook for the young right. And one of those books about the introduction into the magic and introduction into the occult. They want you really to be a part of this of this game, of this charade, of this trap. People think there’s so much different stuff on the Internet. And you can pick and choose. And there’s Russia over there. And now the Chinese, they also want your attention and they want your help as well. And there’s there’s so many influencers and you can’t even watch it all and listen to it all. There’s so much stuff. Somebody put up the script. Everybody’s copying the script because they have direct connections to these networks. And they’re being told to use these talking points or some freelancing freewheeling guys are just copying what they see because they like it and they think it’s successful. That’s the media reality that’s on the Internet right now. People think the Internet is free and there’s all kinds of rebellions going on in the Internet. The real knowledge is in books. What really brings you success. That’s still books.
Nyquist: Yeah. Well, anyway, I want to thank everybody for joining us on this session of Friends and Enemies. We’ve been talking about Julius Evola and Dugin and this Russian network that’s exploiting this perennialism, trying to use all kinds of different religions and occult beliefs all at the same time. And how inconsistent it is. But yet they do it and it seems to be spreading. So I’m Jeff Nyquist. This has been Friends and Enemies. My co-host is Alex Benesh. We thank you for being with us and we hope you’ll join us next week.
