|
Francis Parker
Yockey
Criticism
of his person and work from various sources Go to articles: Review of: Kevin Coogan. Dreamer of the Day. Francis Parker Yockey
and the Postwar Fascist International.
Autonomedia.
Francis
Parker Yockey's
"Imperium,
Looking
Backward,
Francis
Parker Yockey, an American fascist who died in jail in 1960,
Imperium: The Philosophy of
History and Politics "Imperium" may be the closest thing that the real world offers to H.P. Lovecraft's fictional "Necronomicon." Though little more than a rumor in the world at large, it is a key text in the underground universe of international fascist ideology, and it seems to have had a significant effect on the development of Traditional Satanism. At the risk of making "Imperium" sound more interesting than it actually is, we may note that the book claims an almost magical essence for itself. By its own account, "Imperium" is "part of a life of action" and "only in form a book at all," so that reading it is more than a merely mental event. "Imperium" was written in the service of an ambitious cause. The author, Francis Parker Yockey, holds that it is the destiny of the West to found a universal empire, the core of which will be a Nazi Europe. His book promotes European unity and the expulsion of the United States from the continent's affairs, as well as a fascist revolution in the United States itself. "Imperium" is a reprise of history and political theory, designed to show why the outcomes of the world wars of the first half of the 20th century were only temporary setbacks toward the ultimate goal. If America were a church, Yockey would have been an apostate. Born in Chicago in 1917, he was involved with various right-wing political groups as a young man. He took both a BA and a law degree at Notre Dame University and was commissioned an officer during the Second World War, though he soon received a medical discharge. As a civilian attorney, he served on the staff that helped to prepare war-crimes trials in Germany, but was dismissed for siding with the defendants. (This may have included spying for them.) Yockey retired to Brittas Bay in Ireland to write "Imperium," finishing it in 1948. (January 30 of that year, to be precise: the 34th anniversary of Hitler's accession to the chancellorship of Germany.) The pseudonym that appears on the cover, "Ulick Varange," is supposed to illustrate the author's pan-European sympathies. "Ulick" is allegedly a Danish-Irish name, while "Varange" refers to the Norsemen who roamed early-medieval Russia. Readers of "Prince Valiant" will no doubt recall the Byzantine Emperor's "Varangian Guard," who were recruited from such people. We know that Yockey soon published "Imperium" himself, in a very limited edition, but the rest of his biography after 1948 quickly becomes crepuscular. He worked for the Red Cross for a time, but he also seems to have acted as a courier for Communist Block countries during the coldest part of the Cold War. He was probably involved with Odessa, the legendary international network of postwar Nazis and fascists. In any case, it is clear that the US State Department stopped renewing his passport: he was arrested at Los Angeles in 1960 for having entered the country without a valid one. He was visited while in jail by W.A. Carto, one of the key figures in American Neo-Nazism, who contributed a brief introduction to the Noontide Press editions of "Imperium." While still incarcerated, Yockey probably killed himself, though his admirers suggest he was murdered by the authorities. Yockey begins "Imperium" with the sentence, "This book is different from other books," but readers will be reminded of other authors. Yockey often seems to be actually trying to match the gassy, abstract style that Hitler uses in the non-autobiographical passages of "Mein Kampf." ("Imperium" is dedicated "To the hero of the Second World War," about whose identity we need not speculate.) Yockey fails to write as badly as Hitler, though it is hard to imagine anyone getting very far into this book simply to enjoy the prose. The most important single source for "Imperium" is "The Decline of the West," by Oswald Spengler. Yockey purports to be developing Spengler's cyclical interpretation of Western history, and many passages of "Imperium" are near paraphrases of Spengler's famous book. What "Imperium" most resembles, though, is "The Hour of Decision," a short work that Spengler published in 1934. Some evidence, if any were needed, that Spengler was not an infallible prophet is provided by his suggestion in that book that the US would respond to the crisis of the 1930s by breaking up along ethnic lines, with the largest fragment a Communist regime based in Chicago. Still, as is often the case in intellectual history, "The Hour of Decision" (and, I suppose, "Imperium") have become less anachronistic with the passage of time. Their formulation of geopolitics as the "clash of cultures" is formally similar to the arguments put forward in recent years by Samuel Huntington, though of course with quite different content and policy recommendations. A more recent book that "Imperium" brings to mind is Patrick J. Buchanan's "A Republic, Not an Empire." That work restates the old "America First" argument that America had no business in either world war, a position Yockey shares. They also both assume that the natural form of interstate relations is opportunistic predation. Finally, one may recall that, in "The Turner Diaries," William L. Pierce's infamous novel promoting a Nazi revolution in the US, the protagonist's life is changed by reading a semi-sacred ideological text called simply "The Book." It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that "The Book" may have been suggested by "Imperium," or at least by its cult. My own reason for reading "Imperium" is that I am prepared to go quite a long way with Spengler's cyclical model of history, and I am always curious to see what other people make of it. Since I actually have a short book on the subject available online (Spengler's Future), it was inevitable that "Imperium" would be brought to my attention. Having read it, I now see that it is not in any serious sense Spenglerian, though it appropriates some of Spengler's vocabulary. "Imperium" is most significant as the missing link that connects the more esoteric features of Nazism from the 1920s to the 1990s. Now Spengler was indeed a “fellow traveler” with the Nazi Party. However, as his defenders must inevitably point out, his support was opportunistic. He thought that the Party was the only hope for Germany in a world that, he believed, was in the midst of a prolonged crisis that could be negotiated successfully only with a high degree of national cohesion. Spengler, as a citizen, was just another conservative nitwit who thought that the Nazis could be used to preserve the Prussian virtues for the future. Spengler was not much interested in race. Actually, like the postmodernists of the later 20th century, he thought that race was pretty much a construct. His ideas about nationhood and peoplehood were conspicuously sensible. A nation, he argued, was just the more or less variegated population of a given area whom historical events had organized to march in the same direction. (William Strauss and Neil Howe's idea of a formative generational "crisis" is not so different.) Nations are thus not primordial entities. Their effective life-spans are just a few centuries long, after which they collapse back into mere populations. Spengler was also not much interested in the Jews, though his account of Jewish history in "The Decline of the West" is both sympathetic and acute. One may take or leave his notion of the origin of the Jews as a confessional "nation," not different in kind from the Muslims or the Parsees or even the Byzantine Greeks, within what he called "Magian Culture." In any case, Spengler suggested that Western antisemitism had been largely the result of the fact the older Magian societies had been "out of phase" with the Culture of the younger West, and forecast that the phenomenon would disappear as the West approached its final form. Spengler's vision for the future of the West is really about completion and exhaustion. Intellectual life would become a self-referential glass-bead game, satisfying in its own terms, that will gradually be abandoned for personal religious experience. Politics would eventually pass into the hands of powerful individuals as traditional institutions lose legitimacy, a process whose distant end is the return of dynastic politics. He did forecast a future "universal state" (the phrase is Toynbee's), which would at least encompass Europe, and possibly the whole planet. However, he said it would occur primarily because the members of the international system would find it more convenient to cede most of their sovereignty to the most prestigious member of the system. This was, pretty much, what happened to the nations of the ancient Mediterranean world: the Roman Empire was, formally, a system of alliances. Spengler clearly hoped that Germany would be the Rome of the future, though he recognized this meant that the Germany he knew would dissolve into Europe. His support for German nationalism was based on the belief that, for Germany to play the role he hoped for, Germany would have to be the last nation to dissolve. Yockey saw things differently. He saw the future empire, the Imperium of his title, as the outcome of a great act of will. The next century or so, he said, will see a phenomenon he calls the Resurgence of Authority. This will be based on the activity of a dedicated international minority with a clear vision of where the world is supposed to go. This sounds like a traditional 20th-century revolutionary vanguard, with perhaps some overlay of Nietzsche's ideal of the "artist politician," but Yockey takes it a step further. He does not aim for just the creation of a new class, but of a new race, a pan-European one that would be the ethnic basis of the Imperium. Hitler talked about ideas like this to Otto Wagoner in the 1920s, and to Hermann Rauschning in the 1930s. It is a feature of the historical scenario promoted today by some Satanists. (Incidentally, an essay I wrote on this subject, The Dark Imperium, was written long before I read Yockey's book, though I had almost certainly run across his title by then.) These notions have some origin other than Spengler: a good candidate is the Theosophical forecast of the Sixth Root Race. Spengler is often criticized for his vitalist approach to history, and in fact taking him altogether seriously probably requires finding some more respectable mechanism for his historical cycles. He spoke of the small set of civilization-producing Cultures (the noun is usually capitalized in the Atkinson translation of Spengler's "Decline") as organisms of some sort. His use of the term may have been more than metaphorical, but it is reasonably clear that he did not think they were actually alive. For Yockey, however, Cultures become a whole new order of life. They exercise a subtle force upon the members of a Culture, and they fight with other Cultures. Though the terminology is not quite the same, Yockey's Cultures seem to be metaphysical entities of the same order as the Aeons of more recent right-wing occultists. There is nothing in "Imperium" like the "Aeonic Magic" employed by certain Satanist groups that have clearly been influenced by the book, but it is not hard to see how Yockey's idea might have been developed in that direction. Yockey is also taken by other crank ideas which I have not seen elsewhere, but which I suspect are probably not original with him. For instance, in explaining the deleterious effects of the bout of immigration to the US from about 1900 to 1920, he states the remarkable principle that immigration has never actually increased the total population. Rather, there is some ideal figure toward which the population is tending. Immigration simply causes the birthrate of earlier arrivals to fall. Thus, he says, the immigration of the first two decades of the 20th century simply replaced Western people with Slavs and Jews and Asians. Something that Yockey has in common with Nazism as it is generally understood is the designation of trends he dislikes as pathologies, which in Yockey's system become pathologies of Culture. Spengler, who held that Cultures never affect each other in anything essential, gave the name "pseudomorphosis" to the process whereby one Culture affects the superficial features of another. His great example was the Byzantine Empire, which he said had been part of the Magian Culture along with its Sassanid neighbor, but which maintained a misleading Greco-Roman veneer after the death of the Greco-Roman Culture, whose territory it partially occupied. Yockey takes this unremarkable idea and turns it into "cultural distortion," which is what he says happens whenever members of one Culture influence the development of another. For Yockey, "culture distortion" is not just an accident, but a disease. Although the idea is stated in neutral terms, it soon becomes evident that the chief cultural distorter of the last two centuries is the Jews, and that almost the whole of 20th-century art and politics has been one, long Jewish distortion. While he does allow that some of the problems of the modern West, such as democracy and capitalism, are "autopathic," nonetheless he leaves no doubt that the overthrow of the Jews is the precondition for the Imperium. Yockey identifies two great 20th-century revolutions. One was the American Revolution of 1933, whereby the cultural distorter took full control of the United States, and the other the European Revolution of 1933, when Europe first began to organize itself against the Slavic threat from the East. Yockey really does use terminology like this. If the words "Nazi" or "National Socialist" occur in "Imperium," I do not remember seeing them. The Nazi hierarchy become simply the "European leaders." The US, because of its high level of cultural distortion, is simply written out of the West. As for the Russians and the Slavs in general, he held that they were assimilable to the West, but only as individuals. There is, it seems, no alternative to the Germanization of eastern Europe. However, in a remark that may shed significant light on Yockey's later career, he notes that Russian occupation policy after the Second World War was, to some extent, preferable to that of the Western Allies. The Russians did not persecute the "European leadership" as a class, but worked with those who were useful. Yockey does not argue that the Holocaust did not occur. Rather, he dismisses the question out of hand, referring to it as "the concentration-camp propaganda." The only slaughter of innocents in the 1940s that concerns him was the suffering inflicted on the German population during the dual occupation by the barbarian Russians and the distorter Americans. Both of these, he believes, must be driven from Europe. At a later stage, something of the United States might be salvaged through a national uprising that would overthrow the Jewish government. One could lengthen the list of odd things about this very odd book. I suppose that an author who thinks of slavery primarily as a benevolent social-welfare program might be expected to think that Abraham Lincoln was a "charlatan." On the other hand, it is a mystery to me how anyone, Nazi or otherwise, could characterize the professorial Woodrow Wilson as an "adventurer." Specific points like these simply underline the fundamental weirdness of a 30-year-old American sitting on the Irish coast in 1948 and arguing that his country had actually lost the recent European war. Still, the oddest thing of all may be the persistent and variegated nature of the audience for "Imperium." It took Amazon.com a few weeks to shake down a copy from an American Neo-Nazi publishing house for me, but it is apparently not very hard to come by. It is known, not just to fascist-leaning people in the US, but, it would seem, in Russia and Europe. The book has never been famous, and to my knowledge it has never been a big seller, but it has not gone away, even after 50 years. This is very disconcerting.
Copyright © 1999 by John J. Reilly
(The following book review will
appear in the journal Race Traitor, 2001. )
by Loren Goldner Review of: Kevin Coogan. Dreamer of the Day. Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International. by Loren Goldner "Provincial patriotism of the nineteenth- century type can evoke no response. The unity of the West which the barbarian has always recognized is recognized at the last hour by the West itself." "Western policy has the duty of encouraging in its education of the youth its manifestation of strong character, self-discipline, honor, ambition, renunciation of weakness, striving after perfection, superiority, leadership--in a word--Race." Francis Yockey, Imperium, (1948).
Fascism in every country, until 1945, almost always conjured up archaic,
pre-capitalist, pre-Enlightenment national myth for its symbolism: Mussolini and
the Roman Empire, Franco and the Falange, Hitler and the Thousand-Year Reich. In
the United States, the task was made more difficult by the absence, for the
radical right, of a "usable" pre-capitalist past; for stone white
supremacists, the Iroquois Nation or Yoruba culture would hardly do.
Yockey, in in his youth, in the depths of the depression, was briefly
sympathetic to Marxism, but quickly abandoned it for fascism.
Subsequently, in late 1930's Chicago, he jostled different far-right groups such
as pro-Hitler German Bundists, anti-labor vigilantes, Silver Shirts and
the Father Coughlin movement. But Yockey himself was no storefront fascist.
Possibly the decisive ideological influence in his life had been the reading, in
1934, of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (a world-wide best seller in the
1920's). Through Spengler (including his later works Years of Decision and
Prussianism and Socialism) Yockey stepped into the ferment of 1890-1933 Germany
known as the "Conservative Revolution", and such other (sometimes
brilliant) reactionary theorists as Carl Schmitt, Karl Haushofer, Ernst Niekisch,
Ernst Juenger, Moeller van den Bruck, not to mention the highly ambiguous
earlier figure of Friedrich Nietzsche. For most of these intellectuals, Hitler
and the Nazis were vulgar guttersnipes and their "voelkisch" (i.e.
populist) ideology merely one more version of the mass society the Conservative
Revolutionaries despised. What mainly characterized the Conservative Revolution
were variants of an aristocratic radicalism that imagined a regeneration of
decadent bourgeois society from the throes of materialism, democracy, socialism
and feminism by a "hard" cultural elite of "supermen", men
such as those tempered in the trench warfare of World War I and the "storms
of steel" (the title of Juenger's 1920's best-selling novel) of the modern
technological battlefield. Spengler, in his major work, had defined
"universalism" as the passage from "culture" to
"civilization" in an organic rise and fall; this phase emerged when
the old culture-bearing elite was sinking into effete aestheticism, and prepared
the way for Caesarism (an anticipation of the coming of Hitler). "Race is not group
anatomy. The hierarchy of races at any given time are historical creations which "can have, of course, no eternal validity"(14). "Thus the school of Gobineau, Chamberlain...was on the same tangent as the materialists who announced that there is no such thing as Race...The source of a hierarchy of races is History, the forces of happening...Thus, in the subjective sense, there is also a hierarchy of race. Above, the men of race, below--those without race"(15). For Yockey the "twentieth- century viewpoint on this matter" (in contrast to the biologistic view of 19th- century reaction-LG) begins from the "observed fact...that all strong minorities--both within and without a High Culture--have welcomed into their company the outsider who was attracted to it and wished to join it, regardless of his racial provenance, objectively speaking. The racial snobbery of the nineteenth century was intellectual, and its adoption in a too-narrow sphere by the Resurgence of Authority in Europe between the two World Wars was a grotesquerie."(16) "...'safeguarding the
purity of race' in a purely biological sense is sheer materialism. Following this critique of biological racism, Yockey spells out his own view: "...Western policy has the duty of encouraging in its education of the youth its manifestations of strong character, self-discipline, honor, ambition, renunciation of weakness, striving after perfection, superiority, leadership--in a word--Race."(18) As with race, so with narrow nationalism: "Provincial patriotism of the nineteenth- century type can evoke no response. The unity of the West which the barbarian has always recognized is recognized at the last hour by the West itself."(19) . It was the Slansky show trial in Czeckoslovakia in 1952 which brought Yockey's "National Bolshevism" to its final form, in which he transposed the German-Russian "Rapallo" strategy of the interwar period to the new world situation of U.S.-U.S.S.R. polarization, now advocating that Europe as a whole should ally with the Soviet Union, as the lesser danger, against the greater menace of the United States. Along with this view (articulated at a time when most Nazis and other far-rightists were virulently anti- Soviet) went Yockey's revival of Haushofer's call for full support for Third World struggles of national liberation, for the purpose of weakening the U.S. world empire. By executing 11 Jewish members of the Czeck Communist Party, the Stalinist bloc was signaling, in Yockey's view, that it was ready to abandon the last pretenses of "Jewish-inspired" proletarian internationalism and fully assert the "barbaric" culture of the peasant masses which had been the other force of the revolution. Yockey laid this out in his 1953 book The Enemy of Europe. In this shorter work, Yockey more sharply rejects, in his own barely-coded language, the "nineteenth-century" aspects of Nazism: "the engrafting of the
outworn nonsense of the vertical race notion onto the glorious European
Resurgence of Authority brought about by the European Revolution of 1933 was an
enormous tragedy"(20) "the Europe of 2050 will be essentially the same as that of 1950, viz. a museum to be looted by barbarians, a historical curiosity for sightseers from the colonies; an odd assortment of operetta-states; a reservoir of human material standing at the disposal of Washington and Moscow; a loan market for New York financiers; a great beggars' colony, bowing and scraping before the American tourists."(21)
Yockey's basic view, drawing on his Spenglerian categories, was that the rule of
the "culture-distorters" (i.e. the Jews) who had "taken
power" in the U.S. in Roosevelt's New Deal, posed a greater threat to
Europe that the Soviet Union, which was merely a peasant-barbaric society. If
the Soviet Union conquered Europe, in Yockey's analysis, 1-As the French writer
Charles Péguy put it 100 years ago, "the slogan 'neither left not right'
always means 'right'" ("qui dit 'ni de droite ni de gauche' dit de
droite") Break Their Haughty Power http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner
"Imperium,
The Philosophy of History and Politics" The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the growing violence and instability both around the world and here in the United States, have impressed on the minds of millions the idea that the world is at a crossroads. People with an interest in history and in ideas are hungry for a perspective that can show their own country and the world what new direction it can take to get out of the current confusion. So far, two trends have emerged. New nations have arisen and claimed what they consider to be their rights, including sometimes the right of revenge against their neighbors for centuries-old grievances, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina. On the other hand, former U. S. President George Bush and others have expressed the hope for a New World Order. "Imperium, The Philosophy of History and Politics" by Francis Parker Yockey, published in 1948 and still available, provides an ambitious perspective on the future, specifically for all peoples of European descent. Francis P. Yockey was no statesman, nor a professional academic, and he has been dead for thirty years. Why is his book important today? "Imperium" is important because Willis Carto is important. Willis A. Carto, publisher since the Seventies of the tabloid newspaper "Spotlight," knew Yockey in the last decade of his life, was one of the last visitors to Yockey before Yockey's mysterious death in jail in 1960, wrote the introduction to the 1962 edition of "Imperium", and has recommended the book on many occasions since. Because readers of "Spotlight" have been engaged in much discussion about the alleged anti-Semitism or "fascist hidden agenda" of "Spotlight," they will no doubt be interested to know what "Imperium" has to say about the possibilities for the survival of Western Culture. "Imperium" begins with a biographical sketch of Yockey by Carto. Yockey was born in Chicago in 1917. He received a B.A. in 1938, then attended Notre Dame Law School, graduating cum laude in 1941. Though opposed to intervention in World War II before the Pearl Harbor attack, he enlisted in the U. S. Army, but received a medical discharge in 1942. Back in civilian life, he began a law practice in Illinois, but soon relocated to Detroit, where he became an Assistant District Attorney in Wayne County, Michigan. In 1946, Yockey was offered and accepted a job preparing testimony for the War Crimes Tribunal, set up by Allied occupation forces after World War II to try Nazi leaders. For eleven months, he worked in Wiesbaden, Germany, helping to prepare the cases against some mid-level Nazi leaders. After a quarrel with his superiors, who, he claimed, were pressuring him to produce propaganda instead of indictments based on objective facts, he resigned in early 1947. Yockey returned to America for a short time, and then moved to Ireland, where took up residence in an inn in Brittas Bay, County Galway. There he wrote "Imperium". Anticipating controversy, he wrote under the pen-name Ulick Varange. Only a handful of copies were printed, at the author's expense, and the two-volumn first edition attracted little notice. Carto published a one-volumn hardback edition in 1962, and a paperback edition in 1969. With a few followers, Yockey founded the European Liberation Front in London in 1949. For his activism, he was beaten in Hyde Park. The group soon collapsed because, according to Carto, Yockey's collaborators were consumed by their great envy for his enormous gifts, and because a great philosopher is almost never also a great man of action. Carto considered Yockey a thinker first and foremost. After a brief job at the Red Cross, he resigned in 1951, and began to travel. Carto does not say where Yockey went on his travels, nor how he supported himself. The FBI, however, revoked his U.S. passport. In 1960, he was arrested in San Francisco for passport fraud, after three passports had been found in one of his suitcasese. Yockey allegedly committed suicide in his cell. Carto is skeptical of this official story. The following evaluation of "Imperium" is footnoted, so the reader can easily verify from the text the points which are summarized here. The index Carto's 1969 paperback edition is very inadequate, containing only references to proper names. Yockey on History Yockey's philosophy of history proposes a cyclical "life-cycle" for the history of all hitherto existing civilizations. He proposes to demonstrate the existence of this "organic" process in eight distinct "Cultures" existing in the past, to explain what part of the cycle our own "Western Culture" is in, and thereafter to expound the political principals which alone can effectively guide the West out of the Civilization Crisis which he saw around him. He acknowledges a large debt to Oswald Spengler, author of "Decline of the West," whom he calls "the philosopher of the twentieth century"; and to Friederich Nietzsche. (1) To understand Yockey's philosophy, one must first understand his definition of Culture, a word which he uses to define the whole history of a civilization. Yockey's definition of a Culture includes not only the arts and literature of a period of history, but also its technology, politics, and economic activities. This resembles the anthropologist's definition of culture, except that for an anthropologist, any people, including a primitive tribe, has a culture, while for Yockey only certain peoples in certain times and places can have a Culture. It also resembles the more typical historical use of the word Civilization, but for Yockey Civilization is a specific later stage in the development of a Culture. The Cultures are Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian, Chinese, Arabian, Classical, Western (also called European), and Mexican-Peruvian, for a total of eight in all. (2) Following Spengler, Yockey rejects the usual Ancient-Medieval-Modern "linear" conception of world history. For Yockey, what is commonly called "ancient history" is actually the history of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Classical cultures. Egypt, Babylonia, and the Classical world each went through stages of early growth, vigor, senility, and death, followed by barbarism. Medieval history is not merely "a middle age" in between ancient and modern history. It is actually the history of a new beginning, the early stages of the history of the Western Culture. (3) The human mind cannot make sense of reality without grouping observed facts into categories. However, any attempt to categorize will produce ambiguities, doubtful cases that straddle the borderline between two categories. Yockey does not recognize that his grouping of civilized human history into eight Cultures creates such doubtful and ambiguous cases. For example, the two halves of the "Mexican-Peruvian" Culture were separated by hundreds of miles, and before the Spanish conquest they were not aware of each other's existence. On what historical grounds are they the same Culture? Was the Byzantine Empire a remnant of the Classical Culture, or the Medieval Greek section of the Western one? Did the Ottoman Empire belong to the Arabian Culture? Yockey does not trouble himself to acknowledge, let alone answer, these questions. Others could be raised as well. A Culture (sometimes he uses the term High Culture) has an organic nature. "Since a Culture is organic, it has an individuality, and a soul. Thus it cannot be influenced in its depths from any outside force whatever. It has a destiny, like all organisms. It has a period of gestation and a birth-time. It has a growth, a maturity, fulfillment, a down-going, and a death." Therefore it has its own individual stamp. After its death, it does not recur. There will not be another Indian or Peruvian Culture, and after its death there will be no recurrence of the Western Culture either. (4) Yockey contrasts the organic view of Culture, which he prefers, to the rationalist-materialist view of history. The latter seeks cause and effect in events of human history. This is, according to Yockey, a misleading way to view history. "Material happenings can be controlled, are reversible, produce identical results under identical conditions, are recurrent, can be classified, can be successfully comprehended as though they are subject to an a priori, mechanical necessity, in other words, to Causality." (5) On the other hand, the events of a Life are "uncontrollable, irreversible, never-recurring, unique, cannot be classified, are not amenable to rational treatment, and possessed of no external mechanical necessity." (6) Destiny-thinking (or organic thinking) is the most fruitful way of viewing history, because the history of a Culture is the history of a type of life. Causality-thinking (or rationalistic-materialist thinking) has produced errors in understanding of history and erroneous theories such as Marxism, Darwinism, and Freudianism. (7) Yockey opposes Materialism on the grounds that it fails to take into account the spiritual aspect of history and of human activity. He does not distinguish between Materialism as a method of analysis and Materialism as a value system. He lumps together Materialism and Rationalism. Moreover, he does not recognize the usual distinction made by philosophers between Rationalism and Empiricism. Here is his list of the foremost philosophers of Causality-thinking: "Kant is the height of this type of thinking, and to this side of Western philosophy belong also Hume, Bacon, Schopenhauer, Hamilton, Spencer, Mill, Bentham, Hobbes, Locke, Holbach, Descartes." (8) This is a curious collection. Yockey, who vehemently rejects atheism, includes in his list the eighteenth century French atheist and materialist Holbach, but also Descartes, who proved to his own satisfaction the existence of God from the existence of thought. What have all these thinkers in common? According to Yockey, they have in common that they all sought to find "Causality" in human institutions, even in Culture. The enmity of a Culture to all outside itself is a fundamental concept for Yockey. "Each Culture-soul is stamped with individuality. From others it takes nothing, and to them it gives nothing. Whatever is on the frontiers is the enemy, whether primitive or Culture-populations. They all are barbarians, heathens, to the proper culture, and no understanding passes between them." According to Yockey, historical facts prove this. "We saw the Western peoples prove the lifeworthiness of the European culture by their Crusades against the highly civilized Saracens, Moors, and Turks. We saw the Germanic populations in the East and their Visigothic brothers in the South push the barbarian Slavs and the civilized Moors continually back during the centuries. We saw Western ships and Western armies make the whole world into the object of booty for the West. These were the relations of the West to that [sic] and those outside." (9) A Culture is the highest form of life, in a hierarchy that consists of plants, animals, "man", and Culture. (10) "A High Culture is plantlike in its attachment to its original soil ....; animal-like in its ruthless devouring of other life-forms; man-like in its spirituality; and original in its power to transform human life, its great life span, and the forcefulness of its destiny." (11) However, not everyone belongs to a Culture. Those outside are no better than animals. "... Man's life in primitivity, and in an area where a High Culture is fulfilling itself, are two incommensurable things. . . . Vis-a-vis the history of Culture-man, primitive man seems merely zoological." (12) By Yockey's premises, there is no such thing as humanity, and therefore no universal ethical duties which any human being owes to any other human being. In fact, there is no serious discussion of ethics in "Imperium". Yockey implies something about his ethical philosophy when he asserts that a Culture proves its "lifeworthiness" by conquest and looting. We can also now note an important feature of Yockey's methodology. Whenever in history Europe is antagonistic to those outside, he cites "the facts" to support him. He ignores the many known historical facts of borrowing between Cultures, or of peace between them. For instance, as Yockey defines his terms, Christianity must be considered a product of at least two non-Western Cultures, the Classical and the Arabian. In the Arabian, Yockey includes not only the Arab civilization at its height, but also both the ancient Israelites and all modern Jews. Nonetheless, Christianity has had a profound influence over the arts, literature, social life and politics of Europe during the whole of what Yockey calls "the Western Culture." So what are we to make of Christianity, according to Yockey's scheme? A profound silence on this subject is maintained throughout the book. A Culture must have a Culture-bearing stratum, which contains all the creators of "religion, philosophy, science, music, literature, the arts of form, mathematics, politics, technics [i.e., technology], and war." It also contains the appreciators who "transmit the great creations downward" and thereby recruit the more talented of individuals into the Culture-bearing stratum. The Culture-bearing stratum is not a class. Some of its members are poor (like Beethoven), and others are unnoticed until after their deaths (like Copernicus and Kierkegaard). (13) According to Yockey, the life-cycle of a Culture is as follows. First there is a Race, which then develops into one or more Peoples, which then develop into Nations, after which there is a Civilization-Crisis, which ends with the resurgence of Authority and the founding of an Imperium. Civilization is the stage at which a Culture becomes "completely externalized" through conflicts (military and Cultural) with alien peoples. Yockey is unclear on the precise difference between the terms "Civilization" and "Civilization-Crisis." He seems to be saying that Civilization is a higher category comprising the two stages of Civilization-Crisis, and Imperium. (14) According to Yockey, it is possible to recognize a person's race at a glance, but he admits that it is difficult to say exactly how one knows a person's race. For Yockey, pigmentation and facial characteristics are mere "group anatomy," and insufficient to characterize a race, for a race possesses a "spiritual" as well as a material nature. He concedes that races can only be classified "arbitrarily," though he also maintains that a Race is "organically" related to its native soil. (15) However, races can be ranked in a hierarchy according to function. The function that Yockey considers most important is "will-to-power." Will to power, the desire to control, is the fundamental difference between human beings and animals. Only by classifying races by will-to-power can modern history and the imperatives of the Western Culture in this age be understood. (16) Will to power is a healthy racial instinct, and is not only good for soldiers, but also impels the higher intellectual achievements of a ulture. "Life which places rationalistic ideas of 'individualism,' 'happiness,' 'freedom' before the perpetuation and increase of power is decadent. Decadent means moving towards extinction, extinction of Higher Life in particular, and finally even of the life of the race." (17) Two things, a superpersonal idea and a leader, transform a Race into a People. The superpersonal idea is communicated by a leader, or a leader-stratum. The leader and the superpersonal idea can be, but are not necessarily, at the service of a Culture. The leader can transform a race into a people if he harmonizes instinct and intellect. "Instinct says, preserve! Multiply! Increase power! Intellect seeks means of preserving Life and increasing power." (18) There must also be some tension between the People and the surrounding human environment. (19) Peoples can exist outside a Culture, but only a Culture is able create Nations. Each Culture has its own conception of nations. In the Arabian Culture, people of the same religion were of the same nation. Their nations had no national frontiers at all. All Muslims were a nation, and all Jews another. In the Classical Culture, the nation was the City-state, a few hundred square miles in extent. The modern concept of a nation-state with wide-ranging boundaries would have been incomprehensible to inhabitants of Arabian or Classical Culture. (20) Nations play a role in the development of the Culture. A Culture goes through a succession of stages, and each stage has its corresponding Spirit of the Age. Since each Nation has a distinct Nation-Idea, the Nation whose Nation-Idea best expresses the Spirt of the Age will come to dominate the Culture. The Nation-Idea is not something that can be summarized in words, but can only be shown by deeds. The English Nation-Idea, for instance, includes Rationalism, money-making, and parliaments. These ideas (which most people would call institutions) have advanced in recent centuries because the English Nation-Idea was in tune with the Spirit of the Age during the "English Age," which Yockey dates from 1750 to 1900. (21) At the height of the Civilization-Crisis, whatever the constitutional law may say, the real power behind the government is the Master of Money. Rationalistic theories of all sorts are now his servant in the realm of thought. Rationalism's "sole effect is to destroy. It destroys . . . art forms and literature, its destroys traditions of service, dignity, loyalty, honor. It destroys the State-idea as embodied in its last refined form, the Absolute State. It lays Civilization waste from within, politically speaking." Meanwhile, the Master of Money keeps all real power in his own hands by corrupt means. What can freedom mean in such a setting? Only two things. "Freedom was attractive to two great groups, the intellectuals and the trading-class. To both of them, the State was a burden. For its one pulse, one imperative . . . the pavement-intellectuals wish to substitute universal criticism, and the traders introduce universal trade without any restriction whatever. . . . The intellectual with his atheist pamphlet and the trader in his counting-house are respectively the masters in the democratic world of thought and action." (22) The twentieth and twenty-first centuries mark the transition from the Civilization-Crisis to the resurgence of Tradition and Authority, and creation of an Imperium. The Imperium will unite all the Nations of the Western Culture, and it will be governed by an Absolutist State. (23) Yockey makes a detailed attempt to demonstrate the Civilization-Crisis only in the Western Culture. He makes passing references to such a stage in the Classical, Egyptian, and Chinese Cultures, and merely asserts that it occurred in the other four. In the whole text of "Imperium", nearly all of the historical references come from the Western and Classical Cultures, with only occasional references to Egypt and China, and about two sentences on the "Arabian" Culture. The others are barely mentioned. In fact, there are no footnotes at all in "Imperium", and according to Carto's introduction, Yockey wrote the entire book without notes. In short, Yockey has failed to document adequately the life cycle of a Culture from his eight historical Cultures. Therefore, there are no historical grounds for believing what he says about the Civilization-Crisis and the Destiny of the "Western Culture." Yockey on Politics When Yockey speaks of the State, he refers to sovereignty, like a European theorist, not to the autonomous States of the Union which most Americans means with they speak of "States." His views on the State can be summarized briefly. "The State is the form of the nation for action." In Western Culture, it transforms itself through stage of (a) Empire and Papacy; (b) Feudal or aristocratic State; (c) Absolutist State; (d) Democracy, by which he means the whole history of constitutional and elected government; and (e) Resurgence of the Absolute State, which instead of being merely National constitutes the unity of the West in a single Imperium. (24) "Politics," as Yockey defines it for us, "is activity in relation to power. . . . Thus it is not morality, it is not esthetics, it is not economics. . . . The way politics divides the world is into friend and enemy." (25) Inner political differences within a State can exist, but if the State has to resort to force, then there are at least temporarily two States, not one. Yockey sometimes uses the term "political unit" to mean State. (26) Since he separates politics from morality, he provides what he calls a political justification for war. "Units engaged in politics may either gain or lose power. Instinct and understanding direct them to seek to increase power. War is the most intense method of trying to increase power. Thus a war that has no practically foreseeable possibility of increasing power is not politically justifiable. A war which promises an increase in power is politically justifiable." (27) He goes on to declare that a political victory can emerge from a military defeat. His example is the utter defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars, followed by Tallyrand's diplomatic victory for France at the "Congress of Vienna." Yockey's illustration proves the opposite of what he claims for it. When we compare France's position in defeat after the negotiated settlement at the Congress of Europe with its highly influential diplomatic and strategic position in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, it is obvious that France lost power. By Yockey's own criteria, France was defeated. Yockey's definition of a true enemy is very revealing. "To say that a unit gained a military victory and also suffered a political defeat is only another way of saying that the military opponent was not a real enemy. A real enemy is he whom one can strike down and thereby increase one's own power." (28) The real enemy is someone weaker than oneself. This is the consequence of Yockey's complete separating of politics from ethics: the politics of a bully, and therefore the politics of a coward. He criticizes Great Britain for fighting two World Wars. In the process, he says, Britain lost commercial supremacy, supremacy at sea, the Empire, and even allegedly its own independence, and survives as a weaker ally of the United States. How did this disaster happen? Because Germany and Britain were not real enemies. Both were a part of Europe and therefore of the Western Civilization. Their real enemies were Russia, Japan, and the United States. Yockey, an expatriate American, does not regard Russians and his fellow countrymen as part of the Western Culture. To him, both are as alien as Japan. (29) Is "Imperium" a post-War rationalization for the Nazis? Yockey himself removes all doubt. Referring to the end of the Second World War, he says, "The Western Civilization was not extinguished . . . even though it was brought to the lowest possible point politically." (30) This can only mean that Germany and her allies were the political representatives of Western Civilization in that war. Yockey does not note the fact that Japan, alleged threat to the West, was Hitler's ally. Perhaps he considers the alliance with Japan as Hitler's temporary expedient, like his two-year-long pact with Stalin. Yockey's attitude toward cross-cultural borrowing and cooperation can be summarized in two words: Culture Pathology. Because a Culture is a form of life, it can suffer from diseases, which can kill it, thereby preventing it from achieving its destiny. As Culture Pathologist, Yockey enumerates three diseases: Culture Parasitism, Culture Distortion, and Culture Retardation. Immigrants into an Alien culture cause Cultural Parasitism. They are parasites because the native Culture comes into conflict with them, and has to expend energy fighting them. Race riots in the United States are Cultural conflicts, in which the host body is attempting to expel the parasites. Such conflicts are not caused by hatred, intolerance, or ignorance. Hatred, intolerance, and ignorance are merely traits of individuals. However, racial conflicts are the result of "higher organic unities" which "impel the mere individuals." (31) Culture Distortion is the borrowing from one culture into another. Any sort of borrowing is unhealthy to the Culture and prevents it from achieving its destiny. Inviting in troops from a State Alien to the Culture---such as the Russian troops in Europe in 1815 and in 1945 and after---is Culture Distortion, for instance, since Russia is outside the European Culture-idea. The political influence of Jews in American life is Culture Distortion also. Writing in 1948, Yockey insists that the Jews control broadcasting, the film industry, book and magazine publishing, and the Universities, as well as both political parties. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt was "the American Revolution of 1993," in which the Culture Distorters (that is, the Jews) took over the U. S. Government. (32) Culture Retardation is the failure to keep up with the latest advances of the Culture. In America, it means that Americans do not appreciate the advances in thought made by Oswald Spengler and other twentieth century German apologists for the Third Reich. (33) By this point, the reader call well imagine what Yockey thinks of the Jews. Because of the Middle Eastern (Yockey prefers "Arabian") origin of their religion, the Jews are spiritually alien to the Western Civilization. It is only to be expected that the European or European-descended majority would resent their presence, or even persecute them. The Jews would as naturally resent the Gentile majority in return. (34) When Jews in Great Britain and America were given equal rights, they merely took advantage of their Gentile fellow-citizens, as revenge for many years of persecution. They used the new freedom to undermine the Western Culture, working through secret societies such as "the Illuminati and its offspring." Yockey believes that the Jews have one ethic for themselves and another for the Gentiles, which requires them to treat a fellow Jew decently, and allows any crime no matter how vile if done by a Jew to a Gentile. These are standard anti-Semitic slurs. Anti-Semitism is no problem for Yockey. He sees it as a sign of the fundamental health of Western Civilization. "Anti-Semitism is precisely analogous in Culture pathology to the formation of anti-bodies in the bloodstream in human pathology. In both cases, the organism is resisting the alien life." (35) In other words, the Jews are bacteria, and their presence makes Western Culture sick. We have seen that Yockey uses historical facts to prove his point about the necessity of conflict between a Culture and anyone from outside it. However, when he deals with cross-cultural influences, he places a value judgement on the facts, calling them symptoms of Culture Pathology. The medical analogy does not disguise his obviously contradictory and subjective method of treating the facts. One might as well compare anti-Semitism to the immune system's attempts to reject a kidney transplant, even though the host body needs at least one functioning kidney and both original kidneys have had to be removed. Yockey's alleged Jewish-controlled conspiracies, of course, do not exist. Judaism teaches that a Jew has precisely the same ethical duties toward a Gentile as toward another Jew. Because Yockey avoids discussing religion in any concrete terms, he never explains in what precise sense the Jews, whose ancestors wrote most of the Bible, can be "spiritually alien" in the predominantly Christian Western Civilization. Given all Yockey has said about the utterly alien nature of the Jews, and given what he has said throughout "Imperium" about the inevitability of conflict between Cultures, then presumably he would consider the Holocaust, in which millions of Jews perished, to be just another example of the German antibodies consuming the alien Jewish bacteria, out of organic necessity. Yockey does not do this. Writing in 1948, he is a pioneer of what is now called Holocaust denial. The photographic evidence is all fraudulent, the gas chambers never existed, and the survivors are all liars. After all, the Jews have one ethic for themselves and another for the Gentiles, so why wouldn't they lie to us? This is what Yockey really meant when he condemned as propaganda the evidence which he was required to gather for the War Crimes Tribunal. (36) According to Yockey, American ideas of liberty and equal rights are nonsense, and were only adopted because the Spirit of the Age was the spirit of the Civilization-Crisis, which promotes individualism and every type of decadence in the name of liberty. In his chapters on America, he repeats the charges which many others have made before him, in his own time, and since, about corruption in American politics. Yockey, however, is not interested in reform. He even questions whether European settlers should have come to America to begin with. White people are "organically" related to their home soil in Europe, and emigration to other continents weakens their resistance to Culture Pathology. (37) The pro-Axis minority in the United States who still opposed the war after Pearl Harbor were the real patriots of World War II in America: "Certain American nationalists were held in gaol for having said in 1941 that a military defeat was to be desired for the welfare of America, since a defeat would destroy the hold of the Culture-distorting group." Those who fought were merely dupes of the Culture Distorters who have controlled America since 1933. (38) If the Axis was fighting for Western Civilization, did the defeat of Germany in World War II spell the doom of the West? Yockey urges the sympathetic reader to take courage. The Spirit of the Age favors revival of the Imperium. Men will no longer die for "liberty." The last chapter of the book is an extended outburst of ranting, the text of which Yockey might have subsequently used in his Hyde Park addresses on behalf of the European Liberation Front. In these last few fervid pages, he assures us that the West possesses "the mightiest superpersonal idea that has ever appeared on this earth-ball." He looks forward to the day when "the Western banner waves on its home soil from Gibralter to the North Cape, and from the rocky promontories of Galway to the Urals." There is no room for his native America in such a vision. Yockey finishes with his favorite quote from Nietzsche: "What does not destroy me makes me stronger," which he presents both in English and in the original German. Conclusion Yockey repeatedly calls for a resurgence of Faith, Tradition, and Authority. Implicitly, Yockey asks the reader of "Imperium" to take his philosophy of history on faith. If "Imperium" is a religious revelation to be accepted on faith, then we can take Western Culture to be its God. Oswald Spengler or Friedrich Nietzsche takes the place of Abraham, the nations of Europe play the role of Israelites, the upcoming Western Imperium is the location of the Promised Land, and Adolph Hitler is the Aryan Moses who pointed the way to the Promised Land without himself being allowed to enter it. If this is Yockey's faith, what personal satisfaction did he receive from it? Earlier we noted that, according to Carto's admiring preface, Yockey's brilliance provoked envy in those less talented than himself throughout his life. Yockey could play the piano well enough for the concert hall, was able to speak several languages, never lost a case in the courtroom, was well-versed in finance, and, above all, knew all the main issues of modern philosophy. Carto does not mention that Yockey's discharge from military service in 1942 was for dementia praecox, a synonym for schizophrenia. His medical report stated that he head disembodied voices speaking to him, believed that a great destiny lay ahead for him, and included important world leaders in his delusions. Perhaps he did have all the intellectual gifts and talents which Carto ascribes to him, but the schizophrenic episode of 1942, even if of brief duration, is the real clue to his philosophy, and to his faith. Yockey's undocumented and ill-conceived "Imperium" is a pseudoscholarly rationalization of his delusion that the envious and resentful dupes of Culture Distortion who were forever dogging him. Yockey wrote "Imperium" confident that History would vindicate him, for it was his destiny to be the prophet of the future Western Imperium! Footnotes (1) Friedrich Nietzsche was not, or course, a twentieth-century man, but Yockey credits him for anticipating the Spirit of the Age of the next age. (2) Yockey, Francis Parker, "Imperium," (Sausalito, California, 1969), pp. 1-8. All references are from the paperback reprint of "Imperium" published by Noontide Press at the date given. Not only are Yockey's definitions of the terms Culture and Civilization unusual, he scatters other idiosyncratic usages through "Imperium". He uses the adjective "erotic" to mean "eroticism" or "eros." In the place of "traditional" he always says "traditionary," a less familiar but acceptable synonym. Instead of "technology" he always writes "technics," which is an acceptable synonym for "techniques," but not of "technology." He refers to Charlemagne in one place as Karl der Grosse, and in a passing reference to the Belgium city of Dunkirk, he calls it Dunkirchen. Throughout, Yockey's choice of words reveals a fondness for the sometimes inappropriate display of obscure vocabulary, and shows him to be an extreme Germanophile. (3) Ibid., 29-37. In opposing the "linear" view of history, Spengler wished to give appropriate significance to the breakdown of the Classical civilization through barbarian invasions during the 5th Century A.D. However, the debt of Western Civilization to the Classical world has been vast and deep. How can a sharp line be drawn between 5th century Rome and Medieval Europe? Since "Imperium" was written, Spengler's criticism of the "linear view" of history has been more convincingly made by Arnold Toynbee and others. Toynbee, for instance, does not insist on the enmity of different Cultures. His theory that a "universal church" can survive from the end of one civilization to the beginning of another accounts for Spengler's objection, without ignoring the profound cultural influence of the Roman Catholic Church, a legacy of ancient Rome and of the ancient Jews, on Medieval Europe. (4) Ibid., 12. (5) Ibid., 13. (6) Ibid., 13. (7) Ibid., 66-97, 224-230. Yockey's critique of Marxism is directed at a narrow, mechanical post-Engels Marxism which was popularized during his lifetime by pro-Moscow intellectuals and propagandists. Yockey is unaware that Marx and Engels conceded that an idea can achieve a "material force" when it is believed in and acted upon by large numbers of people. However, many Marxists of Yockey's time, and since, have been equally unaware of this concept. Yockey's treatment of Darwinism and Freudianism is equally superficial, and with less excuse, since all the significant concepts of Darwin and Freud had been widely published and debated in the literature available in his time. (8) Ibid., 13. (9) Ibid., 9. (10) Ibid., 38-39. (11) Ibid., 369. Like nearly every male English language author before 1975 or so, Yockey uses "man" where many people today would say "humanity" or "human beings" or "a man or woman." (12) Ibid., 43. (13) Ibid., 253-254. (14) Ibid., 612-614. (15) Ibid., 274-285. (16) Ibid., 286-291. Despite all he has just told us, Yockey has no difficulty detecting "blondness" as the physical sign of strong will-to-power in European populations. (17) Ibid., 294-295. (18) Ibid., 321. (19) Ibid., 323. (20) Ibid., 330. (21) Ibid., 334-337. (22) Ibid., 362-363. (23) Ibid., 364-366. (24) Ibid., 355-362. (25) Ibid., 127. (26) Ibid., 131. (27) Ibid., 147. (28) Ibid., 149. (29) Ibid., 150. (30) Ibid., 123. (31) Ibid., 376-381. (32) Ibid., 402-439, 491-511. (33) Ibid., 517-523. (34) Ibid., 311-313. (35) Ibid., 381-391. (36) Ibid., 533. (37) Ibid., 450-471. (38) Ibid., 549-558. (39) Lipstadt, Deborah, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," (New York, 1993), p. 147. Reproduced From: Nizkor Web Site
Francis
Parker Yockey, an American fascist who died in jail in 1960, By Martin A. Lee Late one night in June 1998, a disabled black man was chained to the back of a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas, and dragged by his ankles on a rough rural road for several miles until his head ripped off his body. White supremacist John William King, 25, and two of his friends were subsequently tried and convicted for the gruesome murder of James Byrd Jr. The first of the accused to go to court, King showed little remorse when the death sentence was handed down. He issued a terse statement through his lawyer that ended with a quote from deceased American fascist Francis Parker Yockey: "The promise of success is with the man who is determined to die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly." That Yockey’s name should have surfaced in connection with the gruesome hate crime in Jasper attests to his enduring reputation within neofascist and white supremacist circles. Yockey’s turgid, 600-page book Imperium -- which King quoted in court -- has widely influenced right-wing extremist leaders in the United States and Europe. Born and raised in Chicago, Yockey was one of the most elusive and enigmatic characters associated with the American far right in the 20th century. After World War II, he traveled extensively abroad, weaving a web of neo-Nazi contacts. When the FBI finally caught up with this wandering anti-Semite in 1960, Yockey was carrying seven birth certificates and three passports, all bearing his photo but each with a different name. Shortly thereafter, Yockey committed suicide in a San Francisco jail. Since his death, Yockey has emerged as the patron saint of the Holocaust-denial circuit and a cult figure among white supremacists worldwide. "He is a prophet for our movement," says longtime Ku Klux Klan leader Roy Frankhouser, who keeps a photo of Yockey prominently displayed on his bedroom wall in Reading, Penn. But Frankhouser admits, "It’s a challenge to read Yockey’s writings. His ideas are really complex. I can’t say I comprehend him completely." Boogie-Woogie, Jews and the Soviets Written as a kind of extended philosophical pep talk for brainier right-wing radicals, Imperium pitched an upbeat message to beleaguered fascists, urging them to engage in a "world-historical struggle" at a time when things looked rather bleak for their cause. Yockey insisted that the fall of the Third Reich was merely a temporary setback that paved the way for a future triumph. While Yockey never mentioned Hitler or the Nazis by name in Imperium, he defended their legacy by claiming that the Final Solution was a myth. He was one of the first American writers -- if not the first -- to deny the Holocaust in print: "‘Gas-chambers’ that did not exist were photographed, and a ‘gasmobile’ was invented to titillate the mechanically-minded." Yet in private conversations, according to FBI reports, Yockey praised how the Germans exterminated the Jews during World War II. Yockey was a severe critic of democratic elections, which he described as "a mere cover for unhampered looting by the financier." Yockey also harbored a fierce antipathy toward American popular culture. As he saw it, postwar Western Europe had become a colony of the United States, which was debased by alien minorities and their decadent manifestations -- Hollywood, jazz, boogie-woogie dancing and the like. Yockey’s anti-American views were so extreme that he denounced U.S. cultural domination as a greater threat to Europe than the more heavy-handed military repression imposed by the Soviet Union. He saw the Soviet-orchestrated anti-Semitic show trials in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1952 as proof that Russia had become an enemy of world Jewry and was therefore a potential partner in the anti-American resistance struggle. Yockey’s sympathy for Stalinist Russia put him at odds with most white supremacists in the United States who were fixated on the notion that Soviet Communism was part of a Jewish plot to take over the world. George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party in 1959, was vehemently opposed to Yockey’s pro-Soviet line. Rockwell chided Yockey’s supporters for falling "into one of the most deadly traps ever set by the scheming, villainous Hebrew: the monstrous fraud of Soviet ‘anti-Semitism.’" Impatient with U.S. right-wing extremists who obsessed over little else than Russia and the Red Menace, Yockey searched for allies in other countries. He crisscrossed Europe and the Middle East in an effort to enlist others in his war against America and Jewry. He even spent a few weeks in Cuba, shortly after Fidel Castro seized power, trying to drum up support for his cause. Cyanide for the ‘Creative Genius’ Whatever strange game Yockey was playing came to an abrupt halt a few months later when the FBI arrested him in Oakland, California, on charges of passport fraud. "This is not a small fish. This is a man that we are very, very interested in," a U.S. government source told the San Francisco Examiner. On June 17, 1960, after 11 days in prison, Yockey took his own life by swallowing a cyanide capsule. Yockey’s story might have ended there, if Willis Carto, the founder and godfather of the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby, had not appeared on the scene. Carto was the last person to visit Yockey in jail before he committed suicide. In his monthly newsletter Right, Carto eulogized Yockey, describing him as "a great creative genius" and "a martyr" who had been "hounded and persecuted like a wild beast." More than anyone else, Carto was instrumental in promoting Yockey’s writings and his posthumous reputation among fascists as a so-called American visionary. Carto’s Noontide Press published a paperback version of Imperium. "Now, for the first time, those soldiers who enlist in the service of the West have a profound theory to inspire and guide them," Carto stated in a lengthy introduction to the Noontide Press edition, which has sold more than 20,000 copies. Alluding to the Third Reich, Carto predicted that Yockey’s tome would "live a thousand years." Samples of Yockey’s inflammatory prose -- including an essay addressed to America’s youth -- were later featured in The Spotlight, the weekly tabloid of the Liberty Lobby. And the Institute for Historical Review, yet another tentacle of the Carto complex, was founded to elaborate upon Yockey’s claim that the Nazi Holocaust never happened. After supporting Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s third-party presidential bid in 1968, Carto took control of Youth for Wallace and renamed it the National Youth Alliance. The ousted directors of the Wallace youth group grew concerned when they discovered that the movers and shakers behind Carto’s political apparatus were part of a subterranean neo-Nazi cult known as the Francis Parker Yockey Society. "They belong to secret cells," columnist Drew Pearson reported in 1969, "where they are known only by code names. ... They sing the old Nazi songs, hoard Nazi war relics and display the swastika at their meetings. ... They seek the overthrow of democracy in the United States." Imperium was introduced as the founding theoretical text of the short-lived National Youth Alliance, which disbanded amidst internecine strife. (It would be reconstituted as the National Alliance by William Pierce, a former Rockwell ally and today a key neo-Nazi figure.) For several years, one-time Klansman David Duke sold Imperium through his mail-order book catalog. In 1981, Liberty Bell Publications, run by George Dietz in Reedy, W. Va., brought out another book by Yockey called The Enemy of Europe. This obscure tract was dedicated to "the founder of the Francis Parker Yockey Society, Louis T. Byers, an Aryan of Aryans… ." Excerpts of The Enemy of Europe had previously appeared in TRUD! From the White Underground ("Trud" is Russian for "truth"), a small-circulation journal edited by American rightist Douglas Kaye, who also published a collection of Yockey’s essays. Yockey and the Modern Right Yockey’s books and articles continue to be distributed by neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups in the U.S. and abroad. German and Spanish translations of Imperium are now available in European bookstores. In addition, Yockey is admired by leading British neo-Nazis, including former British National Party chief John Tyndall, who described Imperium as a work "of outstanding philosophical importance." And a group of French Yockey fans were involved in launching a new European Liberation Front, which has close ties to "red-brown" extremists in post-Soviet Russia. Yockey’s influence also persists today among the growing number of practitioners of Odinism (see "Pagans and Prisons" in this issue) -- in particular, the Ásatrú Alliance, headquartered in Arizona -- who seek to revive the pagan rituals of pre-Christian Nordic culture. These circles intersect with the occult underground, the Church of Satan, and racist elements of the "black metal" music scene. For several years, Kerry Bolton, a New Zealand-based publisher of Yockey’s writings, has been advocating a bizarre fusion of occultism and fascist politics. Kevin Coogan, author of a recently published authoritative biography of Yockey (Dreamer of the Day, Autonomedia, 1999), notes that elements of what he calls "the current Yockey revival" also can be seen reflected in personalities like Michael Moynihan, a musician and writer who inhabits the netherworld of black metal/occult/fascism and is a leading member of the Ásatrú Alliance. Moynihan’s Portland, Ore.-based Storm Records even sells a CD which includes a song that, according to Coogan, is "directly inspired" by Yockey. Coogan also points out the interest in Yockey within the Abraxas Foundation, "a Church of Satan-influenced group." While Yockey remains a cult hero only among right-wing extremists, his story has broader significance. It underscores the fact that resurgent fascist movements can assume widely diverging forms, some of which may be difficult to recognize. This is important to remember at a time when progressive and far-right critiques of economic globalization and the World Trade Organization appear, at least on the surface, to overlap in certain respects. If fascism should return as a serious political force, it is much more likely to appear in an unexpected guise than in a hooded sheet or a brown shirt with a swastika. Martin A. Lee is the author of The Beast Reawakens (Routledge, 1999), a book about resurgent fascism and right-wing extremism in the U.S. and Europe.
Intelligence Report Reproduced
From:
Go to Francis Parker Yockey Page I Go to Francis Parker Yockey Page II
For a long
and detailed dissertation of Francis P. Yockey's
THE
ENEMY OF OUR ENEMIES:
|
