@Capital_Room comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Capital_Room rather dementor-like 10hr ago

America has all the hallmarks of high culture and deep habits, except perhaps for a time measured in millennia

Julius Evola would disagree:

The US has been compared, not without justification, to a melting-pot. It actually presents us with a case in which a human type was formed, with characteristics that are to a large extent uniform and constant, from out of a highly heterogeneous raw material. Emigrating to America, men of the most diverse peoples receive the same imprint; after two generations, except in rare cases, they lose almost all of their original characteristics, reproducing a fairly homogeneous unit in terms of mentality, sensibility, and behavior: the American type.

In this regard, theories such as those formulated by Frobenius and Spengler, who have asserted that there is a close relationship between the forms of a given culture and a kind of “soul” bound to the natural environment, to the “landscape” and the original population, do not seem applicable. Otherwise, an essential part of American culture would have been possessed by the indigenous element, which consists of Amerindians, the redskins. The red Indians were proud races with their own style, their own dignity, sensibility and forms of religiosity; not without justification, a traditionalist writer, F. Schuon, spoke of the presence in their being, of something “aquiline and solar.” And we will not hesitate to assert that had it been their spirit that to an appreciable extent had imbued – in its best aspects and on an appropriate plane – the human material thrown into the “American melting pot,” the level of American civilization would probably be higher.[2]

Instead, besides its Puritan-Protestant component (which, in turn, as a result of its fetishistic emphasis on the Old Testament, possesses many judaized, degenerate traits), it seems that it is precisely the negro element, in its primitivism, that has set the tone in important aspects of the American psyche. It is already characteristic that when speaking of American folklore, it is to the Negroes one is referring, as if they were the original inhabitants of the country. Thus, the famous Porgy and Bess by the Jew Gershwin, which deals exclusively with blacks, is considered in the US to be a classic work inspired by “American folklore.” The composer has declared that he lived for some time among American blacks in preparation for this work.

But the phenomenon of popular and dance music is even more conspicuous and general. Fitzgerald was not wrong when he said that in one of its main aspects, American civilization can be called a civilization of jazz, i.e., of a negrified music and dance. In this domain, very singular “elective affinities” have led America, by way of a process of regression and primitivization, to imitate the Negroes. Assuming there would be a need for frenzied rhythms and forms as a legitimate compensation for the mechanical and materialistic soullessness of modern civilization, one would have done much better to look to the many sources available in Europe: we have elsewhere mentioned, for example, the dance rhythms of South Eastern Europe, which often have something truly Dionysian. But America has chosen to imitate the blacks and the Afro-Cubans, and then from America the contagion has gradually spread to all other countries.

…

The brutality that unquestionably is a characteristic of Americans can well be said to have a negro character. In the happy days of what Eisenhower was not ashamed to call the “Crusade in Europe,” as well as in the early days of the occupation, we had the occasion to observe the typical forms of that brutality, but we also saw that at times, American “whites” went even farther in this respect than their negro comrades, whose infantilism, however, they often shared.

Generally speaking, the taste for brutality now seems to be ingrained in the American mindset. It is true that the most brutal of all sports, boxing, originated in England, but it is in the United States that its most aberrant forms have developed, and it is there that it has become the object of a collective obsession, soon transmitted to other nations. Concerning the taste for getting into fights and coming to blows in the most savage manner it is enough, though, to consider the greater part of American films and popular detective stories: vulgar fist-fighting is a constant theme, evidently because it corresponds to the tastes of American audiences and readers, for whom it seems to be the symbol of true masculinity. America, the world leader, has, on the other hand, more than any other nation relegated the traditional duel to the status of ridiculous European antiquated rubbish. The duel is a method of settling disputes, following strict rules, without resorting to the primitive brute force of the mere arm and fist. There is no need to point out the striking contrast between this American trait and the ideal behavior of the English gentleman, despite the fact that the English made up a component of the original people of the United States.

Another obvious aspect of American primitivism concerns the concept of “bigness.” Werner Sombart has successfully put his finger on it in saying that “they mistake bigness for greatness.” Now, this trait is not found in all non-European peoples or peoples of color. For example, an authentic Arab of the old race, a redskin, an East Asian are not overly impressed by merely material, quantitative, ostentatious size, including that related to machinery, technology and the economy (apart, of course, from already Europeanized individuals). It is a trait found only in truly primitive and childish races like the Negro. It is no exaggeration to assert that the foolish pride of Americans in spectacular “bigness,” in the “achievements” of their civilization, reek of the Negro psyche.

And as for:

But we’re still a juvenile culture and we’re currently in one of those manic phases of adolescent grandiosity. We can do anything!!! Just you fucking watch and try to stop us.

Evola continued with this:

Here, we ought to mention the oft-repeated nonsense about Americans being a “young race,” with the tacit corollary that they are the race of the future. It is true that a myopic gaze easily mistakes regressive infantilism for true youth. Strictly speaking, according to the traditional conception, this perspective must be inverted. Despite appearances, recent peoples, since they came last, are the most removed from their origins, and as such must be considered to be the most senile and decadent peoples. This view, moreover, corresponds to the organic world.[4]. It explains how paradoxically, the similarities of supposedly “young” peoples, in the above sense of late-comers, with genuinely primitive races that have remained outside of world history, and explains the taste for primitivism and the return to primitivism. We have already remarked upon the American predilection, from an elective affinity, for Negro and sub-tropical music; but the same phenomenon is apparent in other domains of more recent culture and art. We could consider, for example, the glorification of “négritude” by existentialists, intellectuals, and “progressive” artists in France.

It follows that Europeans, including the imitators of the higher non-European civilizations, demonstrate, in turn, the same primitive and provincial mentality when they admire America, when they let themselves be impressed by America, when they stupidly allow themselves to be Americanized and enthusiastically believe that this means catching up with the march of progress, and that it is a sign of being liberated and open-minded.

Pour la bonne bouche, we will conclude with a significant statement by a far from superficial American author, James Burnham (in The Struggle for the World): “There is in American life a strain of callow brutality. This betrays itself no less in the lynching and gangsterism at home than in the arrogance and hooliganism of soldiers or tourists abroad. The provincialism of the American mind expresses itself in a lack of sensitivity toward other peoples and other cultures. There is in many Americans an ignorant contempt for ideas and tradition and history, a complacency with the trifles of merely material triumph. Who, listening a few hours to the American radio, could repress a shudder if he thought that the price of survival [of a non-communist society] would be the Americanization of the world?” And unfortunately, to a certain extent, this is already happening.

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