Response to John Reilly’s Review
of Yockey’s Imperium

Some people may be familiar with John Reilly’s “review” of Francis Parker Yockey’s masterpiece, Imperium, which was published online at the following address: < http://www.johnreilly.info/imp.htm >. It seems that this review has not received too much attention, but when I came across it and read it I was angered by the biased and foolish comments made against Yockey, so I decided to write a response to it. I do not intend to make an attack on John Reilly as a person (I actually agree with him on a few issues, although we have diverging views for the most part), but rather to criticize this particular review, which is quite ridiculous. I will simply respond to it in a list of parts, quoting a comment from Reilly and then addressing it.

John Reilly wrote: “‘Imperium’ may be the closest thing that the real world offers to H.P. Lovecraft's fictional ‘Necronomicon.’”

My Response: Is this an attempt at demonizing Yockey’s work?

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: How strange that Reilly makes comments comparing it to the “Necronomicon” but now tries to claim that it is not actually very interesting. Reilly’s actions here could be interpreted as first trying give Imperium the appearance of being “evil” and then discouraging readers from looking into it by claiming it is uninteresting despite being supposedly relatable to the “Necronomicon.”

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: This is an incorrect interpretation of Yockey’s words. What he intends to say is that his book is part of the West’s inner transformation (his predictions of a potential Imperium), not that the reader is doing more than reading and thinking.

John Reilly wrote: “While still incarcerated, Yockey probably killed himself, though his admirers suggest he was murdered by the authorities.”

My Response: Actually, many of his admirers view his suicide as a reasonable action, since Yockey believed that he would be tortured or otherwise mistreated by the government.

John Reilly wrote: “Yockey begins ‘Imperium’ with the sentence, "This book is different from other books," but readers will be reminded of other authors.”

My Response: First, let us quote Yockey in full: “This book is different from other books. First of all, it is only in form a book at all. In reality, it is a part of the life of action. It is a turning-point in European history, a late turning-point, but a real one. There is nothing original in the content of this book, the book itself only is original. The craze for originality is a manifestation of decadence, and the decadence of Europe is the ascendancy of the Barbarian.” As we can see from this first paragraph from the foreword to Imperium, Reilly purposely misquoted and misinterpreted Yockey’s meaning. Yockey did not even claim that anything was original in the book, of course the reader will be reminded of other authors!

John Reilly wrote: “Yockey often seems to be actually trying to match the gassy, abstract style that Hitler uses in the non-autobiographical passages of ‘Mein Kampf.’ … 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.”

My Response: Yockey is clearly not trying to imitate Hitler, since his writing style is very unique and different from what is available in Mein Kampf. Also, many people are actually impressed with Yockey’s style of writing, while those that have trouble reading it simply need to learn how to “flow with it” in order to actually enjoy it.

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: Yockey actually never claimed to be a Spenglerian, despite praising Spengler as the “Philosopher of our Age” and using his concepts as the largest base for his own philosophy. Nor is Yockey’s philosophy actually National Socialist, despite the fact that he agrees with them on many issues.

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: As far as I am aware, this is not true of Spengler’s attitude towards race. He believed that physical race was fluid, subjected to change from the environment, the landscape, and the Culture and spiritual forces accompanying it. He also believes that physical race does have some importance and reality since it has some connection to the attitudes and preferences of the members of a Culture (which is connected to spiritual race, referred to as “horizontal race” by Yockey). Of course, he did believe that if some mixing between physical races occurred without affecting the Culture it would not have any real effect, but this does not mean that he thought race was a “construct.” Yockey had similar views to Spengler, although he worded them very differently. Although it is worth mentioning that both Spengler and Yockey were deceived by the fraudulent studies done on biological race by Franz Boas and his successors, and therefore their assessments on the supposed fluidity of race are inaccurate.

John Reilly wrote: “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… Nations are thus not primordial entities. Their effective life-spans are just a few centuries long, after which they collapse back into mere populations.”

My Response: Oh, of course someone with Liberal tendencies in regards to nation (I am referring to Reilly) would think it is sensible to look at nationhood and peoplehood as temporary and somewhat unimportant. However, the fact is that while Spengler was right about many issues, he failed to see that nations and folks oftentimes have great influence and power on its members (that is, alongside the larger culture and race) which has its presence and roots in a very ancient past.

John Reilly wrote: “Spengler's vision for the future of the West is really about completion and exhaustion… 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.”

My Response: As I mentioned before, Yockey did not claim to be a Spenglerian and agree with Spengler on every detail, he only praised Spengler and used him as the basis for his own philosophy. Therefore, the fact that Yockey diverges from Spengler should not be so surprising.

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: Yockey points out that it is the radical minority which influences, guides, and sometimes creates the forces which change history. He is not implying that a small group of people alone accomplishes incredible tasks, but rather that it is they who are capable of influencing or affecting large amounts of people towards their views.

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: To suggest that Yockey’s idea of uniting Westerners is related to Theosophy is absurd. This strikes me as an attempt to degrade Yockey’s philosophy by comparing it to an insane Occult religion, to which it is hardly comparable. Or is it possible that Reilly has studied the Occult so much that it seems normal to make such comparisons? Either way, to say that Yockey argues for the creation of a new race is misleading; rather, he argues that the culture-bearing members of the West should unite and work together towards the Imperium. The origin of his ideas is more a mixture of Spengler’s own teaching about the nature of Western Culture as well as the arguments of thinkers who argued for pan-Europeanism (Nietzsche is actually mentioned by Yockey as predicting the unification of Europeans). By the way, Rauschning’s dialogues with Hitler were proven to be fake by historians.

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: When the term organism is used to refer to a Culture (or a nation by certain nationalists), it should be clear that what is meant is that it is an entity which unites its individual members, affects their way of thinking with its spirit, and lives and evolves (comparisons are sometimes made to plants) over time. Also, Yockey’s idea of Culture is nearly identical to Spengler, it is ridiculous to assert otherwise. Interestingly, Alfred Rosenberg gave an explanation of Spengler’s view in The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Book 2, Chapter IV) which makes its relation to Yockey obvious: “According to Spengler, such a cultural cycle descends out of the misty distance into a piece of earth like the holy ghost. Those belonging to it experience an heroic era, an intellectually cultural height, civilised decomposition and decline. Deductions concerning our future are drawn from these assertions. Irreversibility is represented as the essence of this new concept of destiny.” Rosenberg directly criticized Spengler for proposing that Cultures are metaphysical in origin, and therefore Spengler must have theorized just that or else Rosenberg would not be making the criticism.

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: This seems to be another subversive attempt by Reilly to make Yockey’s views seem insane, now by comparing them to some ridiculous Satanist magic. The two concepts are hardly comparable, especially since Yockey is a conservative Catholic who would have been offended by the idea of some madman coming up with ways to merge spell-casting with the Spenglerian concept of Culture. Both Spengler and Yockey view Culture as being essentially metaphysical in origin, although Yockey lays a clearer emphasis on the spiritual side.

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: When I read Yockey’s comments on immigration and population growth, I did not get the impression that he was saying that population strangely tends towards a certain figure. He referenced statistical studies as the basis of his point: “Thus from comparative study of American population trends, it emerged that the 40,000,000 immigrants to America from other continents from 1790 up to now — did not serve to increase the population of America at all, but only to change the quality of it.” Therefore, we can see that Yockey, influenced by statistical studies (regardless of their accuracy) available to many people at that time, simply concluded that since the population of America did not change during a specific time period, reproduction decreased from certain causes (which he argues are the result of the stage and condition of the Culture). In short, what Yockey is saying is that since America was receiving non-Western immigrants, yet the overall population of America did not increase, then it must be concluded that Westerners are literally being displaced by foreigners. Whether the math Yockey is relying on to make this assumption is correct or not, his conclusion is not so unreasonable based on the data he received at the time.

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: It is very common to describe “trends” which one finds unpleasant or destructive as pathologies or diseases. This is almost a universal practice, utilized even by Liberal egalitarians who like to label racialism as “sick.” However, what one has to decide is which views have validity and which have invalidity. Many of the trends which Yockey and the National Socialists viewed as pathologies really were damaging to the beauty, the function, and the integrity of their Culture or Volk. In contrast, racialism (true racialism, not primitive hatreds based on color) is not a pathology as Liberals assert since it works towards the cohesion and preservation of ethnic groups and cultures.

John Reilly wrote: “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… 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.”

My Response: Yockey is correct to call large negative changes in Western Culture (such as modern art, for example) distortions, since they are clearly alien to true Western tendencies. (For a commentary on negative changes in culture, especially art, see Dr. Tomislav Sunic’s book Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity).

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: I will not argue for the existence of a Jewish conspiracy, which is what Yockey seems to believe in, but it is clear that Jews and other non-Europeans have had some distorting influence on Western Culture (see Dr. Kevin MacDonald’s works for a study on Jewish influence). A Western nation fully independent of any foreign influence would have instinctually rejected something as disgusting as “modern art,” which completely distorts the meaning of art (which is related to a Folk’s concept of beauty).

John Reilly wrote: “If the words ‘Nazi’ or ‘National Socialist’ occur in ‘Imperium,’ I do not remember seeing them. The Nazi hierarchy become simply the ‘European leaders.’”

My Response: The Axis leaders (not just National Socialists, but Fascists as well) are referred to as European leaders because Yockey believes they are the true representatives of the West at that time. Remember that he believes that they represented the move towards the next phase in Western Culture, as opposed to those who insisted on Liberalism, Capitalism, Democracy, or Communism.

John Reilly wrote: “The US, because of its high level of cultural distortion, is simply written out of the West.”

My Response: There is nothing unreasonable about this, considering how un-Western and generally anti-European America has shown itself to be. America never seems to be working towards the interests of the West, as it is understood in the Spenglerian sense, but rather always against it.

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: Personally I disagree with anti-Slavism, since I view Slavs as fellow Europeans, but Yockey did not believe that Eastern Europe necessarily had to be Germanized.

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: Yockey is suspicious of Allied claims about the Holocaust because he had already been to Nuremburg and witnessed for himself their deceitful propaganda activities. However, I hope Reilly is not arguing that the mass murder and starvation of Axis nations committed by the Allies is simply unimportant.

John Reilly wrote: “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.’”

My Response: Of course, Reilly only pays attention to small comments and details he finds strange, instead of mentioning Yockey’s more significant ideas (outside of culture-distortion). I don’t recall Yockey ever claiming that slavery was a “benevolent social-welfare program,” but he did suspect that Lincoln was simply using anti-slavery as political propaganda to manipulate people.

John Reilly wrote: “On the other hand, it is a mystery to me how anyone, Nazi or otherwise, could characterize the professorial Woodrow Wilson as an ‘adventurer.’”

My Response: The term “adventurer” is simply an insult towards Wilson’s ridiculous and nearly insane attitude concerning the Fourteen Points and “making the world safe for democracy.” In his Introduction to Bacu’s The Anti-Humans, Warren Heath did well to criticize President Wilson's fourteen points as merely “a group of fairy-stories about the peace and justice that the American Santa Claus had in his bag for good little boys and girls in Europe.”

John Reilly wrote: “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.”

My Response: Is this an attempt to push aside Yockey by labeling him as “fundamentally weird”? He argued America lost because the war was a loss for Westerners (and America contained some Westerners, despite its disconnection to the West), not because they lost in the common sense of the term. This is not hard to understand.

John Reilly wrote: “Still, the oddest thing of all may be the persistent and variegated nature of the audience for ‘Imperium.’ … 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.”

My Response: Reilly seems to be disturbed by the fact that this very well-developed philosophical work, Imperium, still reaches people across the world, bringing ideas to them so that they may expand their horizons in philosophical thought and transcend the stupid and diseased ideologies and influences of materialism, Marxism, Liberalism, and capitalism.

THE HISTORY OF CORNELIU Z. CODREANU
AND THE LEGIONARY MOVEMENT
By Christopher Thorpe

“There was suddenly a hush in the crowd. A tall, darkly handsome man
dressed in the white costume of a Rumanian peasant rode into the yard
on a white horse. He halted close to me, and I could see nothing monstrous
or evil in him. On the contrary. His childlike, sincere smile radiated over the
miserable crowd, and he seemed to be with it yet mysteriously apart from it.
Charisma is an inadequate word to define the strange force that emanated
from this man. He was more aptly simply part of the forests,
of the mountains, of the storms on the snow-covered peaks
of the Carpathians, and of the lakes and rivers.
And so he stood amid the crowd, silently. He had no need to speak.
His silence was eloquent; it seemed to be stronger than we, stronger than
the order of the prefect who denied him speech. An old, white-haired
peasant woman made the sign of the cross on her breast and whispered to us,
‘The emissary of the Archangel Michael!’ Then the sad little church bell
began to toll, and the service which invariably preceded Legionary meetings
began. Deep impressions created in the soul of a child die hard.
In more than a quarter of a century I have never forgotten my meeting
with Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.”