Steve Bannon’s roots: Esoteric fascism
Articles
Steve Bannon’s roots: Esoteric fascism and Aryanism.................................................................1
Inside The Secret, Strange Origins Of Steve Bannon’s Nationalist Fantasia.............................4
Steve Bannon’s roots: Esoteric fascism and Aryanism
August 29, 2018
https://news-decoder.com/2018/08/29/steve-bannon-roots-fascism-aryanism/
Steve Bannon helped to lead Donald Trump’s presidential bid and served as White House Chief
Strategist during the first seven months of Trump’s presidency. This article by S. Romi Mukherjee,
who teaches at New York University’s program in Paris and at Sciences-Po Paris, examines key
intellectual influences on Bannon, who played a crucial role in shaping the Trump
Administration’s early policies and who is supporting a number of nationalist leaders around the
world.
By S. Romi Mukherjee
“Bannonism,” or the political philosophy of Steve Bannon, is among the most contentious
forms of a new populism that helped to sweep Donald Trump to power. It also underpins
nationalistic movements in a number of Western democracies.
Rummy-eyed and wearing fatigues, Bannon was an anomaly in Washington before he left
Trump’s White House a year ago. Bannonism is also peculiar — its inspiration is esoteric
fascism and the dark arts.
1/9
Bannon is currently seeking to consolidate extreme-right groups in Europe. Come early
September, his new film “Trump@War” will throw more meat to Trump’s supporters.
Bannonism is code for a battle between populists and globalists, and between nativists and
cosmopolitans. The former are white, or Aryan. The latter are non-whites and also whites
who defend them (whom Bannon calls the “cucks“). Bannon wants to accelerate a race
war.
This does not necessarily make Bannon a fascist himself. Still, he has associated himself
with some of Fascism’s most eminent theorists. In Bannonism, Trump’s narrative of
“whiteness under attack” is reflected in works by extreme-right writers.
According to biographer Joshua Green, Bannon found an archetype in René Guénon, the
high priest of Traditionalism, a school of spiritualism built on nostalgia for the caste
system and martial Aryanism.
The Traditionalists see democracy as decadence that can be redeemed by a new spiritual
elite. Only they can return the world of modern progress to a world of ancient wisdom.
Traditionalists hold that, against the heresy of liberal democracy, the sacred is found in a
cosmic order of rigid social and racial hierarchy.
“A sweeping, apocalyptic view of history”
In Bannon’s view, the white working class of 1950s America, a prototype for Trump’s base,
constitutes the elite. Emboldened by Trumpism, the base will rescue Western civilization
from decline, beating back multiculturalism. Aryan Brahmans will rule again.
In his 1927 book La crise du monde moderne, Guénon cast modernity as a crisis of Tradition,
where the cause of disorder was “the negation of differences themselves, of all social
hierarchy.”
“Guénon, like Bannon, was drawn to a sweeping, apocalyptic view of history,”
Green writes. “Like Bannon, Guénon was fascinated by the Hindu concept of cyclical time
and believed that the West was passing through the fourth and final era, known as the Kali
Yuga, a six-thousand-year ‘dark age’ when tradition is wholly forgotten.”
In Hinduism, the Kali Yuga is an age of excess and heresy, one where races and castes mix.
Untouchables are worshiped by Brahmans, who marry Untouchable women. As
2/9
democracy takes hold, barbarians ascend. Then a flood overruns them and returns the
spiritual elite to the Golden Age.
Bannon spelled out his apocalyptic world view in remarks to a 2014 conference at the
Vatican.
“We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism,” Bannon told the conference
over Skype. “And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can
handle it.”
“Let them call you racists. Wear it as a badge of honor.”
In his remarks, Bannon mentioned Julius Evola, an Italian philosopher who mixed right-
Nietzscheanism, paganism, Hinduism, Buddhism and militaristic Roman Catholicism.
Evola envisaged a New Aryan Man. In his most celebrated work, Men Among the Ruins, he
outlined his mission:
“… to rid the world in revolutionary fashion of a culture of decadence and the new
materialist and collectivist barbarism and to call forth to new life the primal creative
power of the ancient Aryans, in close connection with the values of personality,
hierarchy, spiritual virility and the Reich as both worldly and metaphysical reality….
That is what Western rebirth fueled by the Aryan spirit means.”
Evola, who died in 1974, tried to guide Fascist society towards Traditionalism. But he
was excommunicated by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who was frightened of his
“magic,” and deemed too reactionary by the Nazis.
Bannon has often referred to Jean Raspail’s 1973 Le Camp de Saints. In the novel, a sperm-
drenched guru engineers the mass migration of a million Indians to Europe. The
immigrants are embraced by the humanitarian left. Some crusaders take up arms to
defend Europe, but they are “cuckolded.” The prince of England marries a Muslim
woman.
The novel is sporadically described as scholarship on Brietbart, the right-wing website that
Bannon helped found. It is also a mainstay among supporters of Jean-Marie LePen, the
former leader of France’s anti-immigration National Front party.
Last March, Bannon spoke at a National Front rally in France. “Let them call you racists.
Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor.”
3/9
Would a return to the Golden Age mark progress or regression? And who are the real
barbarians?
[ENDS]
Inside The Secret, Strange Origins Of Steve Bannon’s Nationalist Fantasia
The chief strategist of Trump’s triumph reveals his strange brew of intellectual influences,
including a French-Egyptian Muslim occultist guru, and his apocalyptic view of history.
BY Joshua Green
JULY 17, 2017
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/the-strange-origins-of-steve-bannons-
nationalist-fantasia
“Here’s where the whole populism and nationalism thing came from,” Steve Bannontold
me. It was February, and he was sitting in his White House office in a chair pushed against
the wall, with a dry-erase board opposite him listing all the promises that just-
inaugurated President Trump was going to carry out (“drain the swamp,” etc.). But first,
Bannon wanted to explain the ideas that drove Trump’s shocking upset, to put that victory
into a broader context. With Bannon, everything is always about something much bigger.
Trump’s rise was, he said, transformative for America. But it was only one manifestation of
a powerful global undercurrent. “That’s why,” he said, “you see a nationalist movement in
Egypt, India, the Philippines, in South Korea, and now Abe in Japan. I’d
say Putin and Xi in China are nationalists. Look at Le Pen in France, Orban in Hungary,
and the nationalists in Poland.” Trump was, of course, the most consequential: “Look, I’ve
been studying this for a while, and it’s amazing that Trump has been talking about these
ideas for 25 years.”
By this point, Bannon’s term for his politics, and Trump’s—“nationalism”— was already in
wide circulation in the political press. But the term’s meaning was (and remains) opaque
4/9
and has never been fully explicated. While Trump’s embrace of “America first” nationalism
was chiefly due to its resonance as a campaign slogan, Bannon’s attraction to it had a far
deeper and more complicated lineage.
BANNON’S A POLITICAL ENTREPRENEUR AND A REMARKABLE BLOKE.
From an early age, Bannon was influenced by his family’s distinctly traditionalist
Catholicism and he tended to view current events against the broad sweep of history. In
1984, after Pope John Paul II permitted limited use of the Latin-only Tridentine Mass,
which was banned by the Second Vatican Council, Bannon’s parents became Tridentine
Catholics, and he eventually followed. Though hardly a moralizing social conservative, he
objected bitterly to the secular liberalism encroaching upon the culture. “We shouldn’t be
running a victory lap every time some sort of traditional value gets undercut,” he once
told me. When he was a naval officer in the late 1970s, Bannon, a voracious autodidact,
embarked upon what he described as “a systematic study of the world’s religions” that he
carried on for more than a decade. Taking up the Roman Catholic history first instilled in
him at his Catholic military high school, he moved on to Christian mysticism and from
there to Eastern metaphysics. (In the Navy, he briefly practiced Zen Buddhism before
wending his way back to Catholicism.)
Bannon’s reading eventually led him to the work of René Guénon, an early-20th-century
French occultist and metaphysician who was raised a Roman Catholic, practiced
Freemasonry, and later became a Sufi Muslim who observed the Sharia. There are many
forms of traditionalism in religion and philosophy. Guénon developed a philosophy often
called “Traditionalism” (capital “T”), a form of anti-modernism with precise connotations.
Guénon was a “primordial” Traditionalist, who believed that certain ancient religions,
including the Hindu Vedanta, Sufism, and medieval Catholicism, were repositories of
common spiritual truths, revealed to mankind in the earliest age of the world, that were
being wiped out by the rise of secular modernity in the West. What Guénon hoped for, he
wrote in 1924, was to “restore to the West an appropriate traditional civilization.”
Guénon, like Bannon, was drawn to a sweeping, apocalyptic view of history that identified
two events as marking the beginning of the spiritual decline of the West: the destruction of
the Knights Templar in 1312 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Also like Bannon,
Guénon was fascinated by the Hindu concept of cyclical time and believed that the West
was passing through the fourth and final era, known as the Kali Yuga, a 6,000-year “dark
age” when tradition is wholly forgotten.
5/9
Guénon thought that the way to bring about spiritual enlightenment was to convert small
groups of elites who would go forth and spread his philosophy. Bannon, in fact, emulated
this model at Breitbart News by establishing bureaus in Texas, London, and (to influence
the Catholic Church) Rome. Bannon’s Traditionalism “explains so much,” says Mark
Sedgwick, a scholar at Aarhus University in Denmark and the author of Against the
Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century . “He is
not just some weird guy who likes playing politics, but someone who comes out of a very
serious intellectual tradition. Not a tradition that most people would agree with, or even
understand, but still an important one.”
The anti-modernist tenor of Guénon’s philosophy drew several notable followers who
made attempts during the 20th century to re-enchant the world by bringing about a
restoration. The most notorious of these was Julius Evola, an Italian intellectual and the
black sheep of the Traditionalist family (Bannon cited Evola in a widely circulated video of
a 2014 conference at the Vatican). A monarchist and racial theorist who traced the descent
of the Kali Yuga to interwar European politics, Evola, unlike Guénon (a pious Muslim who
lived in seclusion in Egypt), took concrete steps to incite societal transformation. By 1938,
he had struck an alliance with Benito Mussolini, and his ideas became the basis of Fascist
racial theory; later, after he soured on Mussolini, Evola’s ideas gained currency in Nazi
Germany.
“Guénon thought that once there was a spiritual change, political and social changes
would follow,” says Sedgwick. “Which is why he thought Evola was wrong to go for
political change directly. Bannon is here siding with Evola—he is going for political change
as directly as possible.” The last time a Traditionalist got as close to power as Bannon, says
Sedgwick, “it was Evola with Mussolini—and that did not last long, as Mussolini seems to
have decided that Evola lacked practical sense, and Evola decided that Mussolini lacked
principle.”
His citation of Evola has caused Bannon no end of grief. While Evola, in the end, had little
effect on Mussolini or Hitler, he became an avatar of right-wing Italian terrorists in the ’70s
and ’80s, and enjoys broad popularity among white supremacists such as Richard B.
Spencer. It’s important to note that only a subset of Traditionalists share Evola’s views on
race. Bannon explicitly rejects them, and also rejects any association with Spencer, whom
he calls a self-promoting “freak” and a “goober.” Instead, the common themes of the
collapse of Western civilization and the loss of the transcendent in books such as
Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World (1927) and Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern
6/9
World (1934) are what drew Bannon’s interest to Traditionalism (although he was also very
much taken with its spiritual aspects, citing Guénon’s 1925 book, Man and His Becoming
According to the Vedanta, as “a life-changing discovery”).
YOU HAVE TO CONTROL THREE THINGS,” HE EXPLAINED, “BORDERS,
CURRENCY, AND MILITARY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY.
Bannon, more synthesist than strict adherent, brought to Guénon’s Traditionalism a strong
dose of Catholic social thought, in particular the concept of “subsidiarity”: the principle
expressed in Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo anno, that political matters
should devolve to the lowest, least centralized authority that can responsibly handle them
—a concept that, in a U.S. political context, mirrors small-government conservatism.
Everywhere Bannon looked in the modern world, he saw signs of collapse and an
encroaching globalist order stamping out the last vestiges of the traditional. He saw it in
governmental organizations such as the European Union and political leaders such as
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who insisted that countries forfeit their sovereignty,
and thus their ability to maintain their national character, to distant secular bureaucrats
bent on erasing national borders. He saw it in the Roman Catholic Church, whose
elevation of Pope Francis —“a liberal-theology Jesuit” and “pro-immigration globalist”—
to replace Pope Benedict XVI so alarmed him that, in 2013, he established Breitbart Rome
and took a Vatican meeting with Cardinal Raymond Burke in an effort to prop up
Catholic traditionalists marginalized by the new Pope.
More than anywhere else, Bannon saw evidence of Western collapse in the influx of
Muslim refugees and migrants across Europe and the United States—what he has
pungently termed “civilizational jihad personified by this migrant crisis.” Expounding on
this view at the 2014 conference at the Vatican, Bannon knit together Guénon, Evola, and
his own racial-religious anxieties to cast his beliefs in historical context. Citing the tens of
millions of people killed in 20th-century wars, he called mankind “children of that
barbarity” whose present condition would one day be judged “a new Dark Age.” He
added, “We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think,
metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.”
Bannon’s response to the rise of modernity was to set populist, right-wing nationalism
against it. Wherever he could, he aligned himself with politicians and causes committed to
tearing down its globalist edifice: archconservative Catholics such as Burke, Nigel
Farage, and U.K.I.P., Marine Le Pen’s National Front, Geert Wilders and the Party for
7/9
Freedom, and Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. (When he got to the White House, he also
leveraged U.S. trade policy to strengthen opponents of the E.U.) This had a meaningful
effect, even before Trump. “Bannon’s a political entrepreneur and a remarkable bloke,”
Farage told me. “Without the supportive voice of Breitbart London, I’m not sure we would
have had a Brexit.”
Initially, Bannon thought restoration lay in a rising political generation still some years off:
figures such as Frauke Petry, of Germany’s right-wing Alternative für Deutschland,
and Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, niece of Marine, whose politics he approvingly described
as “practically French medieval,” adding: “She’s the future of France.” It took some time
for him to realize that in Trump (whose familiarity with French metaphysics, we can be
certain, is no more than glancing) he had found a leader who could rapidly advance the
nationalist cause, -- one who fit into the “unbroken chain” of populists in U.S. history that
stretched from Hamilton to Clay to Polk to Teddy Roosevelt and now to Trump..
In the summer of 2016, Bannon described Trump in this publication as a “blunt instrument
for us.” But by the following April, Trump was in the White House and Bannon had raised
his estimation of him to pathbreaking leader. “He’s taken this nationalist movement and
moved it up 20 years,” Bannon said. “If France, Germany, England, or any of these places
had the equivalent of a Donald Trump, they would be in power. They don’t.”
When he took over Trump’s campaign last August, Bannon ran a nationalist, divisive
operation in which issues of race, immigration, culture, and identity were put front and
center. This wasn’t by accident or lacking in purpose. By exhuming the nationalist thinkers
of an earlier age, Bannon was trying to build an intellectual basis for Trumpism, or what
might more accurately be described as an American nationalist-Traditionalism. Whatever
the label, Trump proved to be an able messenger.
For all his paranoid alarm, Bannon believes that the rise of nationalist movements across
the world, from Europe to Japan to the United States, heralds a return to tradition. “You
have to control three things,” he explained, “borders, currency, and military and national
identity. People are finally coming to realize that, and politicians will have to follow.”
Trump, for one, certainly looks to be pursuing that agenda.
He isn’t alone. Before Trump came along, the clearest example of Traditionalist political
influence was in Russia. Vladimir Putin’s chief ideologist, Alexander Dugin— whom
Bannon has also read and cited—translated Evola’s work into Russian and later developed
8/9
a Russian-nationalist variant of Traditionalism known as Eurasianism. Trump’s affinity for
Putin has been well documented, Dugin’s affinity for Trump less so. But Dugin has
produced a series of propaganda videos extolling Trump and seeking to enlist “American
friends” in what he calls our “common struggle”.
Although Dugin’s Eurasianism and Bannon’s Traditionalism differ in many regards,
Sedgwick is struck by their backward-looking commonalities. “In the end, Bannon and
Dugin agree about some very fundamental things that most other people would disagree
with them about,” he says. “Most people think that things are getting better, or at least
should get better, while they think that things are inevitably getting worse. Most people
think that new ideas are worth listening to and may hold the solution, while they know
that new ideas are by definition old ideas. Most people think that conflict is to be avoided.
Bannon and Dugin think it has already started.”
The global surge of nationalism has breathed new life into Guenon’s and Evola’s ideas,
while the rise of political strategists such as Dugin and Bannon has given Traditionalism a
proximity to power not seen since the 1930s and ’40s. To someone whose life’s work is
studying this obscure and secretive intellectual tradition, it’s all very heady, though also a
bit disconcerting. “I find intellectuals like that fascinating, and I respect them,” Sedgwick
says. “But they still terrify me.”
Adapted from Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the
Presidency by Joshua Green (July 18; Penguin Press). Copyright © 2017 by Joshua Green.
[ENDS]
9/9
