Julius Evola: the far-Right's favourite philosopher - UnHerd

Although often overlooked amid the peace-and-love associations of the East , Asian ideas and practices have been used to buttress Western ideologies with elitism, racism and conflict at their core. Much depended on what a given commentator thought was wrong or lacking in Western life in the first place. Where many a 20th-century critic of the modern West focused on the recent past, and on the damage done by industrial capitalism to European scenery and souls, in countries such as Germany and Italy one could find writers reaching back further: beyond what they regarded as the disaster of Europe s Christianisation and into the realms of Nordic myth, ancient German folklore and Imperial Rome. They managed to combine these interests with investigations into the occult and Eastern thought, as additional sources of inspiration in battling modernity and recovering lost values and human capabilities.