The Death of Francis Parker Yockey

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Editor’s Note: On June 17th, 2010, Counter-Currents and North American New Right hosted a Francis Parker Yockey memorial dinner in San Francisco. Eighteen people were present. Michael O’Meara spoke on Yockey’s anti-Americanism and metamorphosis into a supporter of the USSR. The following memorial tribute was not included in his speech.

Fifty years ago, June 17, Francis Parker Yockey, fearing he would be lobotomized by the US government, committed suicide while incarcerated in the San Francisco county jail.

The anniversary of the death of this enigmatic figure — arguably America’s most brilliant anti-liberal thinker — is likely to go unobserved in his native land, for his legacy is still unclaimed.

Unlike what Evola called the “false right,” whose alleged anti-liberalism derives from essentially liberal premises (constitutionalism, free markets, bourgeois social forms and sentiments, etc.), Yockey’s thought derived from Prussian rather than Anglo-American sources.

As his mentor, Oswald Spengler, argued in Prussianism and Socialism (1919), the cultural/political heritage of Prussia’s soldier-state grew out of the tradition bequeathed by the medieval knight, Pietism, and ethical socialism, while the market-based Anglo-American world was founded on principles associated with the Vikings, Calvinism, and individualism.

The ramifications of these different traditions were such that America — (lacking a proper ruling class and a cultural stratum to sustain its European heritage) — came, in time, to scorn its Old World parent, pioneering, in the process, civilizational forms, whose materialist occupations and rationalist presumptions have sought to escape the so-called constraints of history, culture, and blood.

During the 19th century, the rising commercial and business classes, communicating vessels of the liberal ethos, allied with the cosmopolitan capitalism of the British Empire and the ascending economic might of America’s new low-church empire — an alliance ideologically arrayed under the banner of “Anglo-Saxonism” and implicitly opposed to continental Europeans attached to Listian economics, landed property, authority, and tradition.

In our age, the market forces of American liberalism have managed to denature not just the America’s European population, but a good part of the European world.

For though it brought material abundance to some, it also fostered a devastating nihilism that reduces meaning and being to a monetary designation.

If not for America, Yockey believed the anti-liberal forces of authority, faith, and duty — in the form of National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy — would have overthrown the liberal nomos, anchored in America’s “world leadership.”

Instead, the very opposite occurred.

First, the colony turned on its mother soil and father culture — then, it subjugated them, ending up, like the snake swallowing its tail, subjugating and denaturing itself — for it (the colony) was European in origin and origin is inevitably destiny.

Though the “true America,” transplant of Europe, shared her destiny, Yockey believed modern liberal America had become an anti-Europe endeavoring not only to subjugate, occupy, and oppress her, but to destroy her unique heritage of blood and spirit.

The only Americans receptive to his anti-liberalism have, relatedly, been those, like him, whose loyalty to Europe’s High Culture estranged them from America’s culture-distorting — and blood-betraying — liberalism.

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It is a testament, perhaps, to the organic philosophy of history he acquired from Spengler, that Yockey’s anti-liberalism grew from his German roots and from his identity with Europe’s High Culture, while America’s ruling ideas, even on its so-called right, have stemmed mainly from liberalism’s Anglo-Calvinist tradition — and from the Jewish One-World Creed of Mammon it champions.