A Contemporary Evaluation of Francis Parker Yockey, Part 1

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Czech version here ^[2]

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here ^[3])

“Thus, the Liberation Front now states to Europe its two great tasks: (1) the complete expulsion of everything alien from the soul and from the soil of Europe, the cleansing of the European soul of the dross of 19th century materialism and rationalism with its money-worship, liberal-democracy, social degeneration, parliamentarism, class-war, feminism, vertical nationalism, finance-capitalism, petty-statism, chauvinism, the Bolshevism of Moscow and Washington, the ethical syphilis of Hollywood, and the spiritual leprosy of New York; (2) the construction of the Imperium of Europe and the actualizing of the divinely-emanated European will to unlimited political Imperialism.” — Francis Parker Yockey [1]

Francis Parker Yockey (aka Ulick Varange) has enjoyed a renascence over the course of several decades, although his thought was never permitted to die with him in a San Francisco jail in 1960 thanks to the stalwart efforts of individuals such as Willis Carto, William Pierce, and H. Keith Thompson, as well as the ongoing efforts of others such as Michael O’Meara. Yockey has been the subject of a major biography,[2] and is discussed at length in Martin Lee’s book on “neo-Nazism.”[3] This writer’s Renaissance Press also carries a range of Yockey materials including hitherto unpublished manuscripts.[4] Christian Bouchet in France carries material by and about Yockey, and Alfonso De Filippi’s Italian translation of The Proclamation of London in a nicely bound volume is a sterling effort.[5]

Yockey has been criticized by some “Rightist” luminaries such as David Duke, who has stated that Willis Carto’s introduction to Yockey’s magnum opus, Imperium, is of more value than the work itself,[6] while the revisionist David McCalden stated that Imperium served as a good doorstop. Certainly, Yockey’s philosophy does not fit neatly into the racial-nationalist paradigm of genetic reductionism. Like Oswald Spengler’s epochal Decline of the West,[7] to which Yockey owed a great intellectual debt, Yockey focused on spirit and culture above and beyond genetics.

Just as Spengler was criticized by National Socialist race theorists, primarily by Alfred Rosenberg, who nonetheless conceded that The Decline of Tthe West was “great and good” – although by then redundant philosophically;[8] Yockey was not well received by American National Socialist George Lincoln Rockwell, who condemned “Yockeyism” as “dangerous” and “evil.” Although James Madole of the National Renaissance Party was very much influenced by Yockey’s ideas.[9]

Those who continue to regard Yockey’s paradigm as a seminal method for analyzing events, the lasting contribution of Yockeyan philosophy is that of “cultural morphology,” developing Spengler’s theory of “culture as an organism,” and in particular formulating the diagnostic method of “culture pathology,” which includes the concepts of “culture distortion,” “culture parasitism,” and “culture retardation.”[10]

Yockey’s diagnostic method allows one to see beyond the surface of problems which are often otherwise reduced to simplistic formulas of White vs. Black, Christian vs. Jew, and concepts as banal as “Freedom vs. Communism,” which preoccupied even the “Radical Right” of Rockwell, et al.; the arguments of which make for a poor showing when confronted by the pseudo-intelligentsia of the Left and its corporate allies.

It was this perspective which for example allowed Yockey to see, contra much of the rest of the “Right” during the Cold War era, why the US is ultimately a much more pervasive, subversive, and degenerative force for the destruction of Europe than a military invasion by the USSR. This is why Yockey referred to the “Bolshevism of Washington,” a phrase that much of the “Right” from Yockey’s time to our own, would find utterly incomprehensible, if not outright “evil.”

During 1948–1949, when his Imperium and Proclamation were published, Yockey still considered the twin outer enemies of Europe to be the “Bolshevism of Moscow and of Washington.” By 1952, Yockey had come to consider the latter the prime enemy. In an unsigned article in Frontfighter commenting on Point 5 of the European Liberation Front program, it is stated that the opposition to “the virus of Jewish Bolshevism [is] more readily understood, and therefore not as dangerous” as the “ethical syphilis of Hollywood.”[11]

As Yockey saw it, the primary problem with Moscow’s Bolshevism at the time was its leadership of a world colored revolt against the white world, reminiscent of Spengler’s scenario in The Hour of Decision.[12] However, Yockey, like many German war veterans such as Maj. Gen. Otto Remer, whose growing Socialist Reich Party was advocating a neutralist line during the Cold War, saw the primary danger not of a Soviet invasion of Europe but of Europe being subordinated to the US under the guise of protection from “Communism.”

The Liberation Front does not allow Europe to be distracted by the situation of the moment, in which the two crude Bolshevisms of Washington and Moscow are preparing a Third World War. In those preparations, the Culture-retarders, the inner enemies, the liberal-communist-democrats are again at their posts: with one voice the churchills, the spaaks, the lies, the gaulles, croak that Washington is going to save Europe from Moscow, or that Moscow is going to take Europe from Washington. There is nothing to substantiate this propaganda.[13]

Yockey’s reorientation towards an openly pro-Soviet position vis-à-vis the USA, was determined by the seminal event of the 1952 Prague Treason Trial,[14] which Yockey saw as Moscow’s definitive break with the “Jewish” faction within Bolshevism which had been vying for control with the Slavic faction, that at heart remained true to the soul of Russia.[15]

In fact, as Yockey now discerned, the breaks between Moscow and New York had proceeded immediately after World War II when Stalin declined to subordinate himself to American internationalist schemes for a new world order via the United Nations Organization and the Baruch Plan for the supposed “internationalization” of atomic energy, which Stalin perceived would in fact mean US control. This laid the basis for the Cold War,[16] despite the insistence of many on the “Right” that there was an ongoing secret alliance between Jews in Washington and Jews in Moscow to rule the world with the Cold War being a cunning plan to bamboozle the goyim.

Some saw through this nonsense from the start, either under Yockey’s influence or based on their own perceptions of Realpolitik. These included the insightful staff writers at the periodical Common Sense, Wilmot Robertson of Instauration, Dr. William Pierce, and the eccentric but sincere and determined James Madole of the National Renaissance Party.[17]

This then was Yockey’s new orientation in regard to the USSR and the USA during the Cold War:

The treason trials in Bohemia are neither the beginning nor the end of a historical process, they are merely an unmistakable turning point. Henceforth, all must perforce reorient their policy in view of the undeniable reshaping of the world-situation. The ostrich-policy is suicide. The talk of  “defense against Bolshevism” belongs now to yesterday, as does the nonsense of talking of “the defense of Europe” at a period when every inch of European soil is dominated by the deadly enemies of Europe, those who seek its political-cultural-historical extinction at all costs.[18]

And further, those who sought the liberation and unity of Europe could play off the USA against the USSR; if they pursued a policy of Realpolitik as people such as Remer[19] were themselves advocating:

Henceforth, the European elite can emerge more and more into affairs, and will force the Jewish-American leadership to render back, step by step, the custody of European Destiny to Europe, its best forces, its natural, organic leadership. If the Jewish-American leaders refuse, the new leaders of Europe will threaten them with the Russian bogey. By thus playing off Russia against the Jewish-American leadership, Europe can bring about its Liberation, possibly even before the Third World War. [20]

It was fatuous enough to ask Europe to fight for America, it was silly enough to ask it to “defend itself against Bolshevism” . . . . Is there one European — just one — who would respond to this war-aim? But today, openly, without any possible disguise, this is the raison d’être of the coalition against Russia, for Russia has named its chief enemy, its sole enemy, and the sly peasant leadership of pan-Slavs in the Kremlin is not given to frivolity in its foreign policy.

We repeat our message to Europe: no European must ever fight except for sovereign Europe; no European must ever fight one enemy of Europe on behalf of another enemy.[21]

With the publication of The Enemy of Europe in Germany in 1953, primarily as a manual in foreign policy for the Socialist Reich Party, Yockey talked openly of a “new Europe-Russia Symbiosis,” with the occupation of Europe by Russia not resulting in the Russification of Europe, but in the Westernization of Russia.[22]

Of course the world situation turned out radically different from what Yockey and others expected, with the implosion of the USSR and the emergence of a unipolar world under the USA. However, Yockey correctly understood cultural threat of the USA to Western Civilization, and this is his continuing relevance for analyzing the geopolitical situation.

One might say that Yockey underestimated the strength of Western culture distortion vis-à-vis Soviet military power. What is crucial to keep in mind that, like individuals, entire states and Civilizations will turn to the soft option, rather than face hard choices. The method used by the culture distorter is what Aldous Huxley describes as control by “pleasure,” an intoxicant that is rotting the soul of the entire world, with militant Islam as a vestige of resistance from a Fellaheen Civilization, and Great Russia the nearest remainder to an unsullied people that might yet break “the dictature of money.”

The US ruling stratum is conscious of its anti-Western world revolutionary mission and deliberately promotes cultural degeneration as part of its agenda. To call the USA the “leader of the West” or any other such term, is not only a misnomer, it is a travesty; the USA is the Anti-West par excellence, the Great Satan, as many Muslims refer to it.

That the Soviet bloc, with its Spartan values, its martial and patriotic ethos, its “socialist realism” in the arts, was in ruins several decades after Yockey’s death, while the decadent USA emerged as the unchallenged super-power, attests to the tendency of nations – like individuals – to opt for the soft option, rather than face hard realities, despite the expectations of Yockey and also the staff of Common Sense, who closed up shop in the 1970s, convinced that it wouldn’t be long until the Soviets vaporized New York, thus the time for writing articles was past.[23]

However, if we accept Spengler’s theory of the cyclic course of civilizations, one might reasonably expect a renascence of Russian authority and religiosity that will confront US hegemony and force Russia to face new realities and forge new alliances, especially given the scenarios for conflict that can easily arise vis-à-vis China and all Asia.[24]

However, for the moment, the US stands victorious, as the harbinger of cultural death throughout the world, spreading the “ethical syphilis of Hollywood,” the “spiritual leprosy of New York,” and the “Bolshevism of Washington,” which outlasted the “Bolshevism of Moscow.”

Notes

[1] Francis Parker Yockey, Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front (London: Westropa Press, 1949), 29.

[2] Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Post-War Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia, 1999).

[3] Martin Lee, The Beast Reawakens (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1997).

[4] Yockey: Four Essays 1939–1960; Frontfighter newsletter; Yockey/Thompson letters to Dean Acheson, 1952; America’s Two Ways of Waging War, 1952; America’s Two Political Factions, 1952; Yockey FBI Report, 1953; Varange — life and thoughts of Yockey, K. Bolton, Biography of Yockey drawing from FBI and Intelligence files, newspaper accounts of his capture and death, rare typewritten MSS of Yockey; Imperium; Enemy of Europe; Proclamation of London. (www.freewebs.com/renaissancepress ^[6]).

[5] Yockey, Il Proclama di Londra, trans. Alfonso De Filippi (Genoa, 2005).

[6] David Duke, My Awakening (Louisiana: Free Speech Press, 1999), 474.

[7] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols. (London: Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1971).

[8] Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (California: Noontide Press, 1982), 247.

[9] Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 508–11. Madole  published Yockey’s “Prague Treason Trial” and other essays, and was under the influence of Fred Weiss, a German World War I veteran living in the USA, who was closely associated with both H. K. Thompson and Yockey. (Thompson to Bolton, personal correspondence; also Coogan, ibid.)

[10] Yockey, Imperium, “Cultural Vitalism: (B) Culture Pathology,” 367–439. For a very brief summary of these concepts see: Yockey, The Proclamation of London, 12–13.

[11] “What the Front is fighting for?,” Point 5, Frontfighter, #23, April 1952.

[12] Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), “The Coloured World Revolution,” 204–30. In this chapter many later Yockeyan themes can be found, including even the concept of a “white Imperium,” and the repudiation of biological “race purity.” Spengler saw “class war” and “race war” as joining together against the West.

[13] Yockey, Proclamation of London, 30.

[14] Yockey, “Prague Treason Trial, What is behind the hanging of eleven Jews in Prague?,” (Published in Yockey: Four Essays, New Jersey: Nordland Press, 1971) 1952. According to “DTK” in the foreword to Yockey: Four Essays, Yockey supporters in the USA circulated the MS as a mimeographed “press release” dated December 20, 1952.

[15] K. R. Bolton, “Francis Parker Yockey: Stalin’s Fascist Advocate,” International Journal of Russian Studies, no. 2, 2010, http://www.radtr.net/dergi/sayi6/bolton6.htm ^[7]

[16] K. R. Bolton, “Origins of the Cold War: How Stalin Foiled a New World Order: Relevance for the Present,” Foreign Policy Journal, May 31, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/05/31/origins-of-the-cold-war-how-stalin-foild-a-new-world-order/all/1 ^[8]

[17] K. R. Bolton, Cold War Axis: The Influence of Soviet Anti-Zionism on the American Extreme Right (Renaissance Press, 2009).

[18] Yockey, “Prague Treason Trial,” 3.

[19] Martin Lee, The Beast Reawakens, 74. The USSR regarded the Socialist Reich Party as a better option than the Communist Party, and funds were dispensed accordingly.

[20] Ibid., 7–8.

[21] Ibid., 8–9.

[22] Francis Parker Yockey and Revilo P. Oliver, The Enemy of Europe [Yockey], The Enemy of My Enemies [Oliver] (Reedy, West Virginia: Liberty Bell Publications, 1981), 83.

[23] “The End of the Trail,” Common Sense, May 15, 1972. Much insightful political writing was published in Common Sense, and numerous articles have been reprinted as booklets available from this writer.

[24] K. R. Bolton, “Russia and China: an approaching conflict?,” The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, vol. 34, no., 2, Summer 2009.