East & West
The universality of what Guénon and Schuon call "traditional metaphysics" is only due to the fact that the schematic perception of the structure of reality is more or less the same in all times and places. Their attempt to explain it by a lineage of initiatory transmissions is absurd.
The cult of the East only took on the features of a warlike confrontation through the works and the influence of a character considered to be one of the maximum incarnations of reactionary traditionalism in the 20th century, whose decisive contributions to the “spirit of 68” are still the best kept secret that has already been seen in the world.
I refer to the French doctrinaire René Guénon (1886-1951), who ended his days in Egypt as a Muslim devotee. His book East and West, from 1924, under the guise of a mere comparative study, is a true declaration of war, culminating in the outline of a plan for the cultural and even military occupation of the West by Eastern forces, especially Islamic forces.
Whether out of genuine ignorance or cunning, Guénon reduces Western civilization to a mixture of capitalism, scientific materialism and popular pseudo-religions. The last residues of spirituality that he sees in it are decadent Masonry and Catholicism reduced to an “exoteric” perspective, no longer in contact with the “sources of primordial Tradition”. Sources located, of course, in the East, more specifically in the regions of Central Siberia, Malaysia and Tibet crossed by Ferdinand Ossendowski in 1920 according to the narrative of Bêtes, Hommes et Dieux where the famous explorer says he has penetrated the underground sanctuary of the very “King of the world". Coincidence or not, these regions are the same where most of the "Seven Towers of the Devil" are located, radiating centers, according to Guénon himself, of diabolical influence over the entire planet.
Of all the signs of Catholic spiritual strength at the time — the apparitions of Fatima, the miracles of Sto. Father Pio, the flourishing of Catholic intellectual life in the first half of the 20th century —, Guénon wanted nothing to do. For him, everything that did not have a direct channel with the unknown temples of Agartha and Shamballa was at most exoterism, if not pure and simple anti-tradition.
From this unilateral image of a spiritually devastated West, Guénon saw only three possible ways out: the definitive fall in barbarism, the restoration of the Catholic Church under the secret guidance of Islamic spiritual masters and the occupation of the West by Islam, whether by cultural invasion or manu militari.
In contrast to the caricatural reductionism of his view of the West, his image of Eastern civilizations was so charmingly idealized that he even proclaimed that Bolshevism would never penetrate China, so solid were the "spiritual defenses" (sic) of Chinese tradition. Not only did it penetrate, but it installed a lasting genocidal tyranny there whose violence far surpassed that of the Soviet Union and satellite countries. A powerful magnet in the vicinity must have momentarily disoriented the needle of the "infallible compass" that Michel Valsân believed he saw in René Guénon.
[Translated from here]