Review “Fascism, Japan, Zen,” by J. Evola. Edited by R. Rose, The Borghese Books, II and. 2016

When talking about Julius Evola, it is inevitable that feelings are mixed. The work of The Baron, in fact, have been the subject of genuine ideological clashes, often far from that rigor necessary that you should use when you rebuild or comment on the thought of a philosopher. Not surprisingly, in contrast to other masters of Tradition, that an author has not yet been entirely cleared through customs in regime intelligentsia circles, and it is difficult that his studies are mentioned when addressing topics that pure Our studied in background, often with stretches of absolute depth.

In the text (more correctly, in the texts, are a collection of articles and essays) we are going to review and comment on these lines, is skillfully condensed the thought of Evola about Japan, Zen and the East, at a time ranging from 1927 to 1975. Inevitably the political significance of the work of the Roman thinker in sdoganare the East and Japan, in a time where the approach to that part of the globe was characterized by suspicion and exotic appeal.

To open the book, an interesting and wise introduction of the curator, Riccardo Rosati. Rosati knows the subject matter by Evola, and it shows. Not surprisingly, he acknowledges in an Orientalist Baron, although self-taught and not strictly academic in his research (Evola novel approaches to the texts through translation of the same, not knowing, for example, Jap or nese). But what matters is that Evola was able to grasp the essential aspects of the Eastern tradition, because it was equipped with the tools appropriate reading. Those same tools intellectuals who allowed him, as rightly pointed out by Rosati, to grasp the true meaning of Buddhism. Distorted in the West secularized in a nihilistic doctrine, more than an ascetic practice for the liberation from the contingent, capable of opening the man higher meanings.

To reveal in the work, certainly political as well as cultural, which Evola held to clear the East, considered in Italy in the ’20s cradle of anti-fascist danger, on the contrary be considered a mirror of Western materialistic decadence. In the first paper of the collection, the East is not anti-fascism , out of Fascist Criticism October 1, 1927, Evola criticizes in a cultural nationalism closing toward the horizon of the values expressed by the Eastern peoples, inviting his contemporaries to neglect the writings of Orientalists facade and studying oriental wisdom texts, in a spirit imperial , capable of measuring peoples with values expressed by them and not by the yardstick of the parochial prejudice.

And studying is precisely what Evola did. The texts on zen , the elucidation of the fundamental characteristics of Buddhism Traditional, analyzes the essential interpenetration between the Spirit and policy that characterizes Japan, where the Emperor is the divinely elected every devotee whose center is spiritually directed, are the result of a research and a meditation hardly influenced by fashions of the moment, but from a desire to first iron out.

At the end of the volume, we find two important texts in the Appendix of Benito Mussolini, who are worth reading just for the clarity with which the Duce of Fascism was to outline the development potential of the oriental civilization. Mussolini was able to grasp a fundamental aspect of Japan (at least up to the tragedy of the atomic bombs and the subsequent forced Americanization): namely the innate ability to absorb from the people with whom she came in contact and return in the form improved almost everything, holding fast the its millenary tradition. Another inspired idea, and here definitely the influence of evoliano thought helped, Mussolini had understood the need for the West to open a dialogue with the ‘ Yellow East , realizing that the tremendous spiritual force that has accumulated over the centuries, applied to the technique, it would explode with all the vigor that can overwhelm the West itself.

A notebook, therefore, still relevant and very important, not only for those who are about to, or want to deepen the study of the East through the deep lenses of Julius Evola, but also for those who want to thoroughly understand, from a point of view of the political , the spirit that animates half the world now increasingly on the rise, as said the same Mussolini, being the globe “has become pocket”, it is now already in our house.