Elst seems somewhat less obtuse than the previous ones.
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/downloads/books/aid.htm#Chapter1Sec
tion1SubSection6
"The caste system as a religiously sanctioned hierarchical
organization of society has exerted a fascination on Western
nostaligics who felt lost in the modern world and longed for a kind
of restoration of the pre-modern world. Among these nostalgics, one
of extraordinary stature was certainly Julius Evola (1898-1974), an
Italian aristocrat and an independent Rightist ideologue who, after
years in the margin, ingratiated himself with the Fascist regime by
developing a "truly Italian" version of the Race Theory, "more
spiritual than the purely biological German Rassenlehre". Thus, he
rejected biological determinism in favour of will-power, preferring
chivalrous values like courage over the modern rigid bio-materialist
subjection of man to the verdict of his genes. On the other hand, his
occasional conflicts with the ideologues and the authorities of
Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, now eagerly highlighted by his
remaining followers, hardly suffice to make him acceptable, e.g.
there is no excuse for his writing a foreword to the Italian
translation of the anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders
of Zion.
"Though a declared racist, his views were at odds with those of most
White racists, e.g. he glorified Asian cultures because of their
hierarchy and traditionalism, esp. the martial virtues as preserved
(or so Western romantics thought) in imperial Japan. (22) He
professed a premodern aristocratic "horizontal racism": the European
aristocracy was one "race" bound to intermarry, the common people
were the other "race", with national borders and identities being
less important. After being hit during a bombardment in Vienna at the
end of World War 2, he spent his last thirty years in a wheelchair,
writing political-cultural essays and fairly accurate but
always "traditionalist" accounts of Oriental religions. Evola is
interesting because he presented a premodern (and anti-modern)
viewpoint, a living fossil in the 20th century.
"Those who have been duped by the dominant Marxist discourse into
classifying Fascism as Rightist would do well to study Evola's
Rightist critique of Fascism. He attacked Fascism on the following
points: its anti-traditionalism and zest for newness and youth (as
exemplified by its term Duce/"leader", i.e. one who takes the people
to a distant goal, a utopia, as opposed to the premodern "ruler" who
merely maintains the existing order); its superficial modernist
optimism (best seen in Fascist, Nazi, Stalinist and Maoist visual
art); its equalizing "Jacobin" nationalism which minimizes class
differences; its totalitarianism, as opposed to premodern culture's
sense of measure and division of powers; its secularism, which
creates an opposition between the political and the sacred; its
socialism; its personality cult (one ought to revere the institution
of kingship, not the person of the king); and its natalist policy
based on the vulgar cult of numbers, neglecting quality for the sake
of quantity. (23)
...
"A related distortion was Evola's assumption that the spiritual caste
is subordinate to the martial caste, an assumption which he
maintained even in the analysis of a Vedic ritual in which the
king "marries" his priest. (24) The traditional and Vedic view is
that worldly action is subordinate to contemplation, so that
ritually, the king is the bride and the priest is the groom. Evola
turned this upside down, affirming the primacy of the royal function:
partly, this was an exaggerated exaltation of the martial function
typical of the interbellum period (when marching in uniform was an
almost universal style for all kinds of movements, due to the
militarization of a whole generation in World War 1); partly, it was
a projection of a medieval conflict in the Holy Roman Empire between
the Emperor and the Pope, a conflict in which Evola's retrospective
sympathies lay with the Emperor.
"At any rate, it took a top-ranking scholar genuinely rooted in a
genuine tradition, the Brahmin art historian and philosopher Ananda
Kentish Coomaraswamy, to correct the deviations of the Western
enthusiasts of "Tradition". He commented: "As it is, Evola's argument
for the superiority of the Regnum, the active principle, to the
Sacerdotium, the contemplative principle, is a concession to that
very `mondo moderno' [= modern world] against which his polemic is
directed." (25) But the problem with the Traditionalist school is
that they never listen: why should they listen to an Oriental
scholar, when they already have Evola's or Guénon's version of
Oriental wisdom? So, the subordination of genuine Asian tradition to
the pet concerns of some Western seekers and weirdos has continued.