Second World War history

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This essay on America was written at a time when the United States was seen as the leading nation of the world and the model of civilisation. After the Second World War history seemed to have invested the future of humanity in the doctrines and values of Russia and America. On the one side was the Soviet Union, the pure incarnation of the proletarian ideal; on the other side the United States, offering the most out-and-out bourgeois ideology the world had yet seen. These two ideals were shown to the world as two opposed and irreconcilable models of existence, of two global alternatives in terms of ideology, social organisation and culture; but in an article published in 1929 and in Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (Revolt against the modern world), Evola had already put in relief the analogy between the two systems. Over and above the obvious differences of race, of mentality and temperament, and of historical background, there was a perceptible correspondence betwe! en the two kinds of system: the meaninglessness of life centred on the economic and productive sphere of existence; the tendency towards the mechanisation and depersonalisation of every human activity; the collectivisation of large masses of individuals enervated by the rhythms of a frenetic, restless society; the negation of any notion of transcendence (in the one case by means of a dull, state-imposed atheism; in the other case through reducing the religious perspective to a banal, moralistic facade); the formless and soulless character of the arts; the utilisation of all intellectual resources for the purpose of encouraging a solely external and quantitative growth. Between two supposedly opposed systems Evola maintained that there existed only one essential distinction to be made: this relates exclusively to the nature of political power within the two systems and therefore to their mode of procedure in pursuing what is in fact a programme common to both. The bureaucratic Sovi! et dictatorship imposes a mortifying and grey view of life by means of brash propaganda and the adoption of brutal means of administration which attack every conceivable human right including armed repression of popular dissent. In the 'democratic' and capitalist United States the same ends are obtained by a fatalistic notion of the 'inevitable' development of society which is realised at the moment that man is severed from all links with a deeper spiritual reality and becomes absorbed into an anaemic unidimensional vision of existence. In that sense the American model of existence can be argued to be more insidious than the Marxist one.