Translator’s Note

The bibliographical history of La Guerra occulta, Evola’s translation into Italian of the work of Léon de Poncins and Emanuel Malinsky, La Guerre occulte, is as follows:

· First edition: Milan: Hoepli, 1939, with a preface written by Julius Evola in his own name.

· Second edition: Le Rune, 1961, octavo, with a new introduction, signed “Koussis,” which he requested replace the original preface, and a conclusion, unsigned.

· Third edition: Padua: Ar, 1978.

· Second edition facsimile reprint: Arthos, 1979, identical to 1961 second edition in all respects, including the new introduction signed “Koussis,” but with the addition of this editorial comment: “Now that, with the death of the author of these notes, any reason for reserve has vanished, we can state explicitly that they were both written by Julius Evola, over whose signature they reappear now.”

· Fourth edition: Padua: Ar, 1988.

The attentive reader will note that much of Fascismo dal punto di vista della destra, published in 1964, repeats word-for-word passages from Evola’s conclusion to the 1961 edition, which we publish above.

It does not however contain this remark: “Regarding the physical elimination of the Jews,..., for these massacres, of which the vast majority of the German people only heard afterwards, no justification can be given.” (1st edition Il Fascismo. Saggio di una analisi critica dal punto di vista della destra, [Rome: Volpe, 1964]; 5th edition Fascismo e Terzo Reich [Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 2001]).

The reader will recall that Julius Evola was arrested in April 1951 by the Political Police of the Prefecture of Rome and put on trial on suspicion of being the “intellectual guide” to various youthful “terrorist” groups. In the ironically titled “Il Razzismo e altre orrori” (“Racism and other horrors”), published in 1959 in Il Meridiano d’Italia and signed “Julius Evola”), he stated: “As for racism, it has become as stupid as it is commonplace nowadays to make it synonymous with anti-Semitism, Buchenwald, gas chambers and everything else which has been mouthed by the allied propaganda via plentiful exaggeration and even outright falsehood.”

According to The Path of Cinnabar, we know that Julius Evola planned to write a Secret History of the Secret Societies, but that this project never materialized because the materials he had gathered for it during his stay in Vienna, where he had been invited by certain senior members of the S.S. to study Masonic documents, were destroyed during a bombardment of the city.

The first evidence of Evola’s interest in occult history, in what is now called “conspiracy theory,” comes from as far back as the period of the Ur & Krur group, with an article called “Remarks on Counter-Initiation” (signed Arvo). Further evidence appears in the 1930s with the publication of “The Instruments of the Occult War” in 1938 in La Vita Italiana, and in his translation into Italian of the work of Léon de Poncins and Emanuel Malinsky, La Guerre occulte, with which we deal here. He had reviewed this work three years before in La Vita Italiana. His interest was not to flag after the Second World War, since he published two articles on this theme in 1952 in Il Meridiano d’Italia, “The Occult War” and “Behind the Scenes of History,” and the following year examined more systematically, in Men Among the Ruins, the tactics, weapons, and goals of the “occult war,” re-examining certain of the considerations he had already put forward in all the writings we have just mentioned.

Throughout, references to the work of Guénon are abundant, and in this context all Evola’s mentions of him are laudatory. As a matter of fact, the “occult war” is, in broad terms, what the French metaphysician designates, in his own terminology, with the name “counter-initiation,” a theme he explores in depth in The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. To Julius Evola, “The occult war is the war which the forces of global subversion wage behind the scenes, by means which are almost always invisible to ordinary methods of investigation. The notion of occult war belongs, so to speak, to a three-dimensional vision of history, in which history is not considered superficially, according to two dimensions, those of the apparent causes, events, and leaders, but in depth, according to its third, underground, dimension, which contains decisive forces and influences often irreducible to the simple human element, be it individual or collective.”

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