CAUTIONARY

THIS ARTICLE COMPARES THEOSOPHICAL THOUGHT AND JULIUS EVOLA DEMONSTRATING WHERE THEOSOPHY AND BLAVATSKY STOOD BEFORE LATER INTELLECTUALS, COPYISTS AND PSEUDO-THEOSOPHISTS, ATTEMPTING TO EDUCATE ABOUT THE GREAT DIFFERENCES IN THINKING ON THE QUESTIONS AND THEORIES OF RACE IN SOCIETY. WE CANNOT ALWAYS WRITE ABOUT “HIGH METAPHYSICS.” IT IS OUR PHILOSOPHY THAT MUST STILL ULTIMATELY TRIUMPH OVER HATRED AND RACIAL DIVISIONS VOID IN KNOWLEDGE OF OUR TRUE NATURE. TO DO SO, WE MUST AS THEOSOPHISTS DID IN THE PAST, ACT, INTERVENE AND ENGAGE WITH THE SOCIAL CHANGES AND CONTROVERSIES OF OUR TIME.

COMMENTARY

The difference and delusions could not be even more clearer. It never mattered whether the Black man sang Jazz while smoothly puffing the finest cigar in the finest suit or rapped about slinging guns and crack, the critical opinions about us in everything we do and create were the same then and now. The black redneck dysfunctional model and argument of Thomas Sowell, which tell us that our failure as a race merely stems from a lack of adopting middle-class value orientations falls to the ground when closely examined. Take the things Sowell and Evola states about our “lively music.” The same things that were said about rap for example were said about Jazz. Julius Evola’s opinions are typical of the times as explained in Lynne Seago’s paper, From Potent to Popular: The Effects of Racism on Chicago Jazz, 1920-1930. Evola’s views are another example of the nature of thought expressed in the ideas of Charles W. Leadbeater’s about Native indigenous people, combining his “clairvoyant” insight with his racial prejudices. When scholars today look back, they put all these thinkers together into one critique, but their writings reveal key differences, necessary for my argument.

Like a screeching chalkboard, Evola cannot stand to see, smell, or hear of Blacks in anything. It is not difficult to realize, that what this Julius Evola is saying is exactly that of the conservatives and contemporary White Nationalists in our country. Traditionalists complained about the same things then they do now, regarding society. Evola, a man who tries his utmost to sound rational in everything, even having the insight to alter some of his ideas, yet held such a view. We may also contrast Evola’s view of Blacks as contaminating “the Anglo-Saxon” to the paper of Lynne Seago. This look into racial stereotypes about Jazz and Black people among the general American population during the 1920s-30s gives us some insight as to the times and Evola’s thinking. Lynne Seago, as you will read on later explains the traditionalists like Evola accurately:

“In the beginning, jazz was distinctly Southern and distinctly Negro. By the end of the 1920s, however, both white and black jazz bands existed in the city of Chicago, and jazz was played for a national audience. Jazz style also changed, from Negro “hot” to a “sweet” style similar to the popular music of the day. These changes occurred because of racial stereotypes associated with jazz music by the white community, and the black community’s reaction to those stereotypes. Racism in Chicago during the 1920s changed jazz from a potent and distinctly Negro style of music to a diluted by-product of mainstream popular culture. (…) White phonograph companies refused to record Negro jazz because of the traditionalist opposition to jazz music in the general white population. Traditionalists, usually Protestant middle-class Americans of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, connected jazz to the Negro brothels, where it had first become popular in New Orleans. Milton Mezzrow, a jazz clarinetist, wrote that, in the twenties, Negro jazz “was called ‘nigger music’ and ‘whorehouse music’ and ‘nice’ people turned their noses up at it.” They refused to accept jazz because they believed it was immoral. Traditionalists also disapproved of jazz because of supposed origins in “heathen” African spirituals. J.A. Rogers wrote in 1925 that, in jazz’s “barbaric rhythm and exuberance there is something of the bamboula, a wild, abandoned dance of the West African and Haitian Negro.” Taking that idea a little farther, Mrs. Marx Obendorfer said that “Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds….It has also been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate brutality and sensuality.'” Traditionalists thought jazz was barbaric, whether or not it actually had roots in Africa, and believed jazz’s “heathen” roots would influence Americans. Dr. Florence Richards, the medical director of a girls’ high school, said jazz’s influence was “as harmful and degrading to civilized races as it always has been among savages from whom we borrowed it.” Typically middle-class and educated in Western culture, traditionalists opposed jazz because it was a product of “culturally inferior” Negroes. They contrasted their own noble, formalistic styles of art with the “vulgarities and crudities of the lowly origin.” Traditionalists believed that a jazz song, in its crude, Negro form, “sounded like a crazy clarinetist broadcasting from a boiler room on a night when the static was particularly bad.” They compared jazz dancing, which ”began … in the restless feet of the black, to “a series of snake-like gyrations and weird contortions of seemingly agonized bodies and limbs.” Jazz dancing, like the music itself, grew from the lowly nature of Negroes.” LYNNE SEAGO, FROM THE POTENT TO THE POPULAR: THE EFFECTS OF RACISM ON CHICAGO JAZZ, 1920-30

Julius Evola on Occultism and Theosophy tells us, that he had outgrown Theosophical and Anthroposophical speculations in Julius Evola on ‘Modern Occultism’ and Theosophists. Fine. Evola adopted the critique of Theosophy as held by Rene Guenon, but as demonstrated in Georges Méautis: “Theosophy and Theosophism” Dissects Rene Guenon’s Critique, 1922, Guenon’s critique is flawed and more inspired by a personal animosity of similarity in his ideas with H.P. Blavatsky. As explained, in Negrified America, Julius Evola’s views about Blacks in America were typical of the general White American population, and is typical of the present-day Euro-American Radical Right and still even certain Conservatives. Julius Evola views Blacks as fundamentally in their constitution, a degenerate race, infecting the purity of the Anglo-Saxon. Ironically, despite Constantin Von Hoffmeister’s criticism of Julius Evola in Constantin Von Hoffmeister “Secret America”: Defining America as a Race-Based Republic, Evola agrees with him, regarding who he thinks America belongs to, and should belong to. In the end, the organization propagating Theosophy would lose its influence mostly from internal subversion and leadership conflicts, giving birth to offshoots such as Anthroposophy in Germany. The Theosophical Society declines by 1930 as a result of the Krishnamurti-Besant-Leadbeater messianic cult that took over the society. This era of degeneration of the Theos. Soc. provided Evola with his critique. Ultimately, it is National Socialism and Fascism that is able to grab hold of the Age, and still its residual remains. After the Ariosophists, Fascists and National Socialists, come Esoteric Hitlerism, Third Positionism, Neo-Fascism, the Nouvelle Droite, and so forth. As odd as the Theosophical doctrines were, H.P.B. explicitly spoke against the racialist notions as held by Evola and the National Socialists before they even existed — specifically in this case, concerning Blacks in America.

BLAVATSKY ON ALTRUISM AND BLACK PEOPLE IN EUROPE AND AMERICA VERSUS EVOLA

Now compare Blavatsky, a Russian emigrant to America, who called herself a democrat and a republican citizen, versus Julius Evola. When H.P. Blavatsky was naturalized as a U.S. citizen, she wrote concerning Race in 1878: “I abjure all titles of nobility upon being naturalized (…) I am too democratic, and I love and respect the people sufficiently, having devoted all my sympathy to them, and this without distinction of race or color…”

“HE WHO DOES NOT PRACTISE ALTRUISM; HE WHO IS NOT PREPARED TO SHARE HIS LAST MORSEL WITH A WEAKER OR POORER THAN HIMSELF; HE WHO NEGLECTS TO HELP HIS BROTHER MAN, OF WHATEVER RACE, NATION, OR CREED, WHENEVER AND WHEREVER HE MEETS SUFFERING, AND WHO TURNS A DEAF EAR TO THE CRY OF HUMAN MISERY; HE WHO HEARS AN INNOCENT PERSON SLANDERED, WHETHER A BROTHER THEOSOPHIST OR NOT, AND DOES NOT UNDERTAKE HIS DEFENCE AS HE WOULD UNDERTAKE HIS OWN – IS NO THEOSOPHIST.” (HPB, “LET EVERY MAN PROVE HIS WORK”)

“And why not rather turn the public attention to more than one “disgrace to a civilized nation,” taking place on British soil and in American lands, e.g., to the revolting treatment by the Anglo-Indians of the millions of natives, from the highest Brahman to the lowest pariah, and the no less revolting attitude of the white Americans towards their black co-citizens, or the hapless Red-Indians? Cannibals inflict less torture on their prisoners of war than do the two cultured Christian nations in question on their colored Brethren of the “inferior” races. The former kill and devour their victims, after which these are at rest; while the whites of England and America act worse than Cains towards their black subjects and citizens: they torture them mentally, when not physically, from their cradle to their tomb; refusing them every privilege they have a right to, and then turning round and spitting on them as if they were so many toads.” (H.P.B, THE MOTE AND THE BEAM)

EVOLA ON HIS “HEALTHY RACISM”

“…a “healthy racism” has nothing to do with the prejudice of “white skin”; it is essentially a matter of a hierarchy of values, according to which we say “no” to negroes, to all that pertains to them and to all Negro contamination…” (EVOLA)

Evola, stressed out by popularity of Black music tries to explain music intelligently like present-day Ben Shapiro. Evola gives us his monocular “insight” into this “noble” superior thinking about Blacks in America!

Evola pressed by Black Music on the Italian Radio in “Negrified America”

“Not long ago, the newspapers announced that according to some calculations, by 1970 half of the population of Manhattan will be black, and that in the five boroughs that make up the entire city of New York, 28 percent of the inhabitants will be of colored race. Developments in the same direction have been registered in other cities and areas of the United States. We are witnessing a negrification, a mongrelization and a decline of the white race in the face of faster-breeding inferior races.

Of course, from the point of view of democracy, there is nothing wrong with that, on the contrary. We are all acquainted with the zeal and intransigence of American proponents of so-called “racial integration,” which can only further speed the process. They not only advocate complete interracial social fraternization and want the Negro to have free access to any public and political office (so that we may even expect, in the future, a black president of the United States), but also have no objection to negroes mixing their blood with that of white Americans. A characteristic example of propaganda for this agenda is the play entitled “Deep Are the Roots” (in other words: of racial “prejudice”), which Italian radio has felt the need to subject us to more than once.

The ‘integrationists’ who draw these conclusions – as logical as they are aberrant – from the dogma of egalitarian democracy, and who, while talking at full blast about freedom, are in fact advocating a truly coercive system (1), are still opposed, especially in the South, by certain groups that have no intention of giving a green light to the advance of the black race and the “negrification” of their country. However, these latter groups fail to realize the extent of the phenomenon, in the sense that they only notice it in its most material and tangible form. They fail to see the extent to which America is “negrified” not only racially and demographically, but above all in its civilisation, in the behaviour and tastes of Americans, even when there has been no actual mixing with negro blood.

The U.S. has been compared, not without justification, to a melting-pot. It actually presents us with a case in which a human type was formed, with characteristics that are to a large extent uniform and constant, from out of a highly heterogenous raw material. Emigrating to America, men of the most diverse peoples receive the same imprint; after two generations, except in rare cases, they lose almost all of their original characteristics, reproducing a fairly homogenous unit in terms of mentality, sensibility and behavior: the American type.

In this regard, theories such as those formulated by Frobenius and Spengler, who have asserted that there is a close relationship between the forms of a given culture and a kind of “soul” bound to the natural environment, to the “landscape” and the original population, do not seem applicable. Otherwise, an essential part of American culture would have been possessed by the indigenous element, which consists of Amerindians, the redskins. The red Indians were proud races with their own style, their own dignity, sensibility and forms of religiosity; not without justification, a traditionalist writer, F. Schuon, spoke of the presence in their being, of something “aquiline and solar”. And we will not hesitate to assert that had it been their spirit that to an appreciable extent had imbued – in its best aspects and on an appropriate plane – the human material thrown into the “American melting pot,” the level of American civilization would probably be higher (2).

Instead, besides its Puritan-Protestant component (which, in turn, as a result of its fetishistic emphasis on the Old Testament, possesses many judaized, degenerate traits), it seems that it is precisely the negro element, in its primitivism, that has set the tone in important aspects of the American psyche. It is already characteristic that when speaking of American folklore, it is to the negroes one is referring, as if they were the original inhabitants of the country. Thus, the famous “Porgy and Bess” by the Jew Gershwin, which deals exclusively with blacks, is considered in the US to be a classic work inspired by “American folklore”. The composer has declared that he lived for some time among American blacks in preparation for this work.

But the phenomenon of popular and dance music is even more conspicuous and general. Fitzgerald was not wrong when he said that in one of its main aspects, American civilization can be called a civilization of jazz, i.e., of a negrified music and dance. In this domain, very singular “elective affinities” have led America, by way of a process of regression and primitivization, to imitate the negroes. Assuming there would be a need for frenzied rhythms and forms as a legitimate compensation for the mechanical and materialistic soullessness of modern civilization, one would have done much better to look to the many sources available in Europe: we have elsewhere mentioned, for example, the dance rhythms of South Eastern Europe, which often have something truly Dionysian. But America has chosen to imitate the blacks and the Afro-Cubans, and then from America the contagion has gradually spread to all other countries.

The Negro component of the American psyche was already noticed, in his time, by the psychoanalyst C. G. Jung. A few of his observations are worth quoting:

“Another thing that struck me [in the American] was the great influence of the Negro, a psychological influence naturally, not due to the mixing of blood. The emotional way an American expresses himself, especially the way he laughs, can best be studied in the illustrated supplements of the American papers; the inimitable Teddy Roosevelt laugh is found in its primordial form in the American Negro. The peculiar walk with loose joints, or the swinging of the hips so frequently observed in Americans, also comes from the Negro (3). American music draws its main inspiration from the Negro, and so does the dance. The expression of religious feeling, the revival meetings, the Holy Rollers and other abnormalities are strongly influenced by the Negro. The vivacity of the average American, which shows itself not only at baseball games but quite particularly in his extraordinary love of talking – the ceaseless gabble of American papers is an eloquent example of this – is scarcely to be derived from his Germanic forefathers, but is far more like the chattering of a Negro village. The almost total lack of privacy and the all-devouring mass sociability remind one of primitive life in open huts, where there is complete identity with all members of the tribe.”

The passage continues along the same lines, and Jung ends up wondering if the inhabitants of the new continent could still be considered to be Europeans. But his observations can be further developed.

The brutality that unquestionably is a characteristic of Americans can well be said to have a negro character. In the happy days of what Eisenhower was not ashamed to call the “Crusade in Europe,” as well as in the early days of the occupation, we had the occasion to observe the typical forms of that brutality, but we also saw that at times, American “whites” went even farther in this respect than their negro comrades, whose infantilism, however, they often shared.

Generally speaking, the taste for brutality now seems to be ingrained in the American mindset. It is true that the most brutal of all sports, boxing, originated in England, but it is in the United States that its most aberrant forms have developed, and it is there that it has become the object of a collective obsession, soon transmitted to other nations. Concerning the taste for getting into fights and coming to blows in the most savage manner it is enough, though, to consider the greater part of American films and popular detective stories: vulgar fist-fighting is a constant theme, evidently because it corresponds to the tastes of American audiences and readers, for whom it seems to be the symbol of true masculinity. America, the world leader, has, on the other hand, more than any other nation relegated the traditional duel to the status of ridiculous European antiquated rubbish. The duel is a method of settling disputes, following strict rules, without resorting to the primitive brute force of the mere arm and fist. There is no need to point out the striking contrast between this American trait and the ideal behavior of the English gentleman, despite the fact that the English made up a component of the original people of the United States.

Modern Western man, to a large extent a regressive type, is in various respects comparable to a crustacean; he is as “hard” on the outside – as a man of action, as an unscrupulous entrepreneur, as an organizer, and so forth – as he is “soft” and formless in his internal substance. Now, this is true to the highest degree of Americans, who represent the degenerate Western type carried to the extreme. But here we find another of their affinities with the Negro. Inconsistent sentimentality, banal pathos, especially in love affairs, put Americans much closer to negroes than to truly civilized Europeans. Of this, observers can easily find clear evidence in a number of typical American novels and again, songs, as well as in cinema and everyday life.

That American eroticism is as pandemic as it is – technically speaking – primitive, has also been deplored by American girls and women. Which brings us to yet another convergence with what is characteristic of the negro races, in which the at times obsessive part always played by eroticism and sexuality is associated with primitivism; thus, these races – unlike orientals, the ancient Western world and certain other peoples – have never known an ars amatoria worthy of the name. The much-vaunted high sexual performance of negroes is really only of a crudely quantitative priapic character.

Another obvious aspect of American primitivism concerns the concept of “bigness”. Werner Sombart has successfully put his finger on it in saying that “they mistake bigness for greatness.” Now, this trait is not found in all non-European peoples or peoples of color. For example, an authentic Arab of the old race, a redskin, an East Asian are not overly impressed by merely material, quantitative, ostentatious size, including that related to machinery, technology and the economy (apart, of course, from already europeanised individuals). It is a trait found only in truly primitive and childish races like the Negro. It is no exaggeration to assert that the foolish pride of Americans in spectacular “bigness,” in the “achievements” of their civilization, reek of the Negro psyche.

Here, we ought to mention the oft-repeated nonsense about Americans being a “young race”, with the tacit corollary that they are the race of the future. It is true that a myopic gaze easily mistakes regressive infantilism for true youth. Strictly speaking, according to the traditional conception, this perspective must be inverted. Despite appearances, recent peoples, since they came last, are the most removed from their origins, and as such must be considered to be the most senile and decadent peoples. This view, moreover, corresponds to the organic world (4). It explains how paradoxically, the similarities of supposedly “young” peoples, in the above sense of late-comers, with genuinely primitive races that have remained outside of world history, and explains the taste for primitivism and the return to primitivism. We have already remarked upon the American predilection, from an elective affinity, for Negro and sub-tropical music; but the same phenomenon is apparent in other domains of more recent culture and art. We could consider, for example, the glorification of “négritude” by existentialists, intellectuals and “progressive” artists in France.

It follows that Europeans, including the imitators of the higher non-European civilizations, demonstrate, in turn, the same primitive and provincial mentality when they admire America, when they let themselves be impressed by America, when they stupidly allow themselves to be Americanized and enthusiastically believe that this means catching up with the march of progress, and that it is a sign of being liberated and open-minded.

This “catching up” includes the social and cultural “integration” of the negro, which is spreading in Europe itself and even in Italy, and promoted through the subliminal effects of imported films (where blacks and whites are shown mixing in social functions, as judges, police officers, lawyers, etc.) and television, in spectacles showing black dancers and singers mixed up with white ones, so that the general public is gradually accustomed to interracial fraternization and loses every remaining natural sense of race and every feeling of distance. The hysteria caused by the shapeless, screaming mass of flesh that is the negress Ella Fitzgerald during her performances in Italy is a phenomenon that is as sad as it is indicative. As is the fact that the most blatant glorification of negro “culture,” of négritude, comes from a German, Janheinz Jahn, in a book published by Munti, a venerable old publishing house in Germany (the homeland of Aryan racism!). A well-known left-wing Italian publisher, Einaudi, was quick to spread it in our country as well, in a translation in two editions. This ranting book goes to the point of claiming that negro “culture” would be a excellent means of reviving and restoring the “materialistic civilization” of the West…

Regarding the elective affinities of Americans, we would like to refer to one more point. If in the United States of America there was one thing that seemed to be positive and present some sort of hope, it was the phenomenon of a new generation that had championed a kind of rebellious, anarchistic, nihilistic and anti-conformist existentialism: the so-called Beat generation, the Beats, the hipsters and the like, which we will discuss more elsewhere. Well, fraternizing with blacks and a veritable religion of negro jazz, deliberate race-mixing, including white women having sexual relations with negroes, are a characteristic aspect of this movement. In a well-known essay, Norman Mailer, who was one of its main exponents, actually established a kind of equivalence between the negro and the human type of the generation in question, even defining the latter as a “white negro.” Very rightly, Fausto Gianfranceschi has written in this regard: “There is a parallell to the fascination exerted by negro ‘culture,’ in the terms described by Mailer, in the effect of the message of Friedrich Nietzsche at the turn of the century. The starting point is the same concern with shattering fossilized conformity through the immediate awareness of vital and existential facts; but what confusion, what degradation, if the negro, as seen today with jazz and the sexual orgasm, is placed on the pedestal of the ‘Superman’! “(5).

Pour la bonne bouche, we will conclude with a significant statement by a far from superficial American author, James Burnham (in “The Struggle for the World”): “There is in American life a strain of callow brutality. This betrays itself no less in the lynching and gangsterism at home than in the arrogance and hooliganism of soldiers or tourists abroad. The provincialism of the American mind expresses itself in a lack of sensitivity toward other peoples and other cultures. There is in many Americans an ignorant contempt for ideas and tradition and history, a complacency with the trifles of merely material triumph. Who, listening a few hours to the American radio, could repress a shudder if he thought that the price of survival [of a non-communist society] would be the Americanization of the world?” And unfortunately, to a certain extent, this is already happening.

(1) Forced “integration” is a blatant violation of the principle of freedom, and that violation is only secondarily a matter of ”race”. No family has ever been denied the right not to welcome strangers it dislikes into its home or to stay apart from them (whatever the reason may be for such an dislike); but fraternization with negroes in public life is imposed – ironically in the name of liberty, of a freedom that is unilateral. So-called segregation – apartheid – is deplored, even though it is the only reasonable system, and one that harms nobody: let each everyone remain in their own realm, among their own. It is unbelievable what “progress” has brought about in the degenerate white race: the British, who until recently were extreme practical racists, to the point of believing that beyond the English Channel, there dwelled what was almost a different humanity, and in their colonies to haughtily hold themselves apart from even “colored” representatives of ancient civilizations superior to their own (India, China, etc.), have at the time of this writing, as a result of the “anti-colonialist” infatuation, forced their compatriots in Rhodesia to secede from the Commonwealth, applying sanctions against them because they refuse to yield to the imposition of granting the equal and indiscriminate democratic vote to the mass of the black population, which would have forced them out of the land that had been civilized only by them.

As for the US, if it is indeed the case, as some claim, that a guilt complex for the wrongs done to blacks in the former regime of slavery are the motive of the “anti-segregationists” – as if all the blood shed by whites in the fratricidal civil war (officially fought for the freedom of the blacks) were not enough – why do they not request that one of the fifty states of the Union be emptied and ceded, so that all American blacks could be moved there, allowing them to rule themselves and do whatever they want without bothering or contaminating anyone? That would be the best solution.

(2) A man of letters with intellectual pretensions, Salvatore Quasimodo, has deplored the “racist” ideas expounded here, and has accused us, among other things, of self-contradiction, because while we are against negroes, we nonetheless respect Amerindians. He has no suspicion of the fact that a “healthy racism” has nothing to do with the prejudice of “white skin”; it is essentially a matter of a hierarchy of values, according to which we say “no” to negroes, to all that pertains to them and to all Negro contamination (the Negro races, in this hierarchy, are just above Australian primitives, and according to a well-known morphology correspond mainly to the type of “nocturnal” and “telluric” races, as opposed to the “diurnal” type), while on the other hand, given what the white race has been reduced to in the age of colonial mercantilist expansion, we would certainly be willing to concede superiority over “whites” to the higher Hindu, Chinese, and Japanese types, and to some Arab strains, despite the fact that they do not have white skin.

(3) One may add the absolutely Negro character of the movements of American comedians and varieté dancers.

(4) Of course, here only one aspect of Nietzscheanism is taken into consideration. The degree of confusion that reigned in American existentialism can be seen in the fact that while on the one hand making common cause with the Negro, on the other hand, some were attracted by the transcendence of the Far Eastern esoteric school of Zen.

Translated by G. A. Malvicini. Source: Negrified America by Julius Evola, Das Gletscherkreuz

How about some old lively music. . .

I maintain the same principle stated here, as I do in this article. Merely calling them out as racists will never defeat them, if such people know they are racist, and proudly, consciously adopt such views and hold themselves, to be in perfect reason. Calling-out Racist Occultists and Esotericists? This is What I think about Philosophers like Evola In Reactions to Julius Evola on Buddhism, Jean Varenne had written in her introduction to his book The Doctrine of Awakening, that a man like Julius Evola was particularly suitable […]