Despite the rise of computer translation technology, language remains a significant barrier to the sharing of important ideas. Italy is home to an active identitarian scene with its own print and web publications, but most sympathetic English speakers’ acquaintance with it is limited to having heard a bit about Casa Pound—an important component of the Italian dissident right, but not the whole. Recognizing the desirability of broadcasting their message beyond the borders of Italy, five prominent activists arranged for publication of a small anthology of their writings in English last October under the title Italian Vanguard: Ideas for Future Predators.

Important influences on the Italian identitarian movement include Nietzsche, Marinetti, Evola and the French nouvelle droite, especially Guillaume Faye. They reject liberal capitalism and the monotheistic tradition, and much that goes under the label “conservative” in the English-speaking world. Many find inspiration in the myth of Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from Olympus. Accordingly, they are critical of any tendency to set limits to technological advance—an attitude they consider un-European. (This is not, of course, equivalent to denying that technology can and has been put to harmful uses.)

By way of introduction, we shall look at the essay “Stay Superhuman” by Carlomanno Adinolfi. Signore Adinolfi is an electrical engineer who has written three novels in the fantasy genre and contributed to the nationalist website Il Primato Nazionale (www.ilprimatonazionale.it) since 2005.

Today’s dominant ideology is fond of appeals to “humanity,” a concept useful to egalitarians since it tends to strip actual persons of all that distinguishes them. But a closer look reveals the ease with which these supposed humanitarians can deny the human status of all who oppose them. During Italy’s “years of lead,” a time of political turmoil which lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, leftist terrorist groups proclaimed the slogan “killing a fascist is not a crime,” always with a tacit reservation of the left to decide for themselves who was a fascist. The attitude persists: in February 2023, an Italian “anti-fascist” was arrested for participating in an armed assault on Hungarian citizens taking part in a demonstration. Sympathizers back home got her elected MEP, whereby she acquired parliamentary immunity for her past actions! A license for violence appears the natural result of the cult of humanity. Americans will remember the “punch a Nazi” kerfuffle of a few years ago as an expression of the same mentality.

During the First World War, Italian soldiers adopted the motto “it is better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep.” But not everyone agrees with this sentiment, of course. Lions can be scary. Adinolfi sees the dominant ideology of the West as

a great attempt to repress all the “fierce” qualities of the human being. A man who is too masculine is a “toxic male chauvinist;” a child who stands up to the bully by beating him up instead of reporting him to the teacher is punished more severely than the bully himself; a street fight, especially if it happens for political reasons and one dares to have “certain ideas,” is likely to be punished with a disproportionate number of years in prison. This is the path followed, if only unconsciously, by all the crazy vegans and environmentalists who blame hunting, horse racing, [and] bullfighting. The standard bearers of “do-gooder” egalitarianism fear and viscerally hate those ancestral instincts that since the dawn of Man have always elevated the aristoi above the masses.

It is true, of course, that civilization requires channeling and placing limits upon violent human instincts. But it is an illusion to believe they can be made permanently unnecessary and done away with. Life will always remain a struggle, and the heroic virtues will never become obsolete. Adinolfi cites an illustration from Italian history: Garibaldi’s “expedition of the thousand.” His men were denounced as pirates, but they freed and unified Italy when negotiation was failing.

Masculinity, as Jack Donovan has written, derives from the tasks men had to perform in our primary environment of evolutionary adaptation, the hunter-gatherer band: defending territory and overcoming threats from other groups, resource scarcity, and environmental stresses. But modern man has become a victim of his own success, providing so much security and so many resources that the experiences of danger and want have been forgotten. As a result, the masculine virtues that made civilization possible are no longer valued, and they atrophy: “When man no longer has to deal with risk, when from a wolf he turns into a house dog, he is destined to decline.”

Adriano Scianca, another contributor to Italian Vanguard, writes with sensitivity of how primitive masculinity is subsumed and elevated but not eliminated within a flourishing civilization:

Man loves more to found civilizations that to abide by their laws. If subjected too long to given order, he withers. This is why the tendency to gather in a Männerbund, a manly community—gangs, militias, fraternities—manifests itself so often in history. Of course, the gang clashes with another symbolic form of men’s power: fatherhood, i.e., the laws of the city. The band of brothers thrives where the father is missing, no longer there or not there yet, thus at the beginning or end of civilization. When the father is there and performs his function, the brothers feel like sons first and foremost, the bond with the father prevails over that with each other. In order not to wither, civilization must hold the two dimensions together. If the gang prevails, it is anarchy; if the father dominates, it is an oppressive power that stifles individuality. The gang must be organically integrated into the Law.

Adinolfi himself writes of the need to maintain a balance between the dynamic force of the conquering gang and the static force of civilization which must rein in barbaric impetuosity so that it does not overreach and civilization degenerate into anarchy.

He finds a disturbing precedent for today’s human self-domestication in an event of late antiquity:

In the 4^th century, Emperor Constantine canceled military service from the political cursus honorum. To become a magistrate, governor, senator, one no longer had to go serve in the legions. As a result, a resident army of barbarians was formed, which was no longer bound to the fortunes of Rome.

Simultaneously, the empire came to be ruled by a class of soft and fearful bureaucrats, and Rome’s end was not far off. Mussolini knew better; he was fond of saying: “One can go from the tent to the palace provided one is prepared to go from the palace to the tent.”

A careful study of today’s ruling humanitarian and egalitarian ideology reveals a firm determination to destroy every attachment presupposed by what Jack Donovan has called the way of men: family, clan, nation, borders, identity. Our task is to safeguard these essential human goods. Adinolfi does not believe “conservatism” can provide a useful model:

Complex dynamic systems, whether biological or mechanical, in attempting to regulate themselves “dampen” certain behaviors so that their output does not become unstable, so that the system always remains controlled. While the progressive is the sworn enemy who wants to kill the noble predator, the conservative is the control valve that seeks to tame and depower it.

Egalitarianism has not simply been ‘taken too far’; it is fundamentally false and pernicious, and we must seek its total overcoming.

Other essays in Italian Vanguard offer meditations on the work of Ernst Jünger, space as the frontier for future human endeavor, and a challenging philosophical meditation on potentiality (“Dynamis: A Philosophy of Force”).

Guido Taietti is perhaps the contributor best known in the English-speaking world due to his appearance at 2023’s Scandza Forum and 2024’s American Renaissance Conference. I have reviewed his book Political Witchcraft here.

In the present volume he offers some thoughts on the concept of heroism in Western thinking. He points out that in a vast, thinly populated country such as Russia, retreat can serve to stretch an enemy’s supply lines and thus contribute to victory, as it did against Napoleon in 1812. In the West, however, a retreat of even 25 miles may involve the loss of an entire city with its population. Hence the ideal of the sacrificial hero on the model of Sparta’s Leonidas.

Today, however, the West is dominated by liberal capitalism, an inherently antiheroic way of thinking based on rational decision making with a view to individual utility. From liberalism’s point of view,

nothing is more absurd than dying for a cause, losing the material good par excellence, the one which makes possible the enjoyment of all others for the sake of something that does not even potentially offer a material benefit (a ‘cause’). Of course, the need for heroes can be considered a rational choice from the point of view of society if one postulates the existence of a mechanism that reasons in collective terms.

Heroism thus presupposes the reality of the collective. It is an aspect of the sacred, anti-economistic dimension of life. The struggle against liberal economism is thus the sacred and heroic struggle par excellence.