Selections from Francis Parker Yockey

3,781 words

Edited by Kerry Bolton

Francis Parker Yockey was born on September 18, 1917. In commemoration of his birthday, I have extracted the following passages from a variety of typewritten manuscripts that, as far as I know, have been hitherto published only in my 1998 collection of Yockey essays and newspaper cuttings.[1] I have also included extracts from several other essays. The essay on Constitutional Law has perhaps never been published.

“The Tragedy of Youth”

This essay, perhaps Yockey’s first in political philosophy, was published in Father Coughlin’s Social Justice, August 21, 1939. It was republished as part of a collection, Four Essays, in 1971.[2]

The alien-minded minority in control of the cinema, the radio, and the newspaper and magazine press has poured out a constant stream of propaganda with the intent of gaining complete spiritual power over the minds of young Americans emerging into maturity. With what success the attempt has met everyone knows who has talked on their own level to representative American youths from the ages of 19 to 27. One and all their world-views have been cut out for them in New York, Hollywood and Washington.

Appalling numbers of youth have been led into a cynical ultra-sophisticated attitude which regards drinking as a badge of social aptitude, which makes a fetish of sport and professes eroticism as a way of life. A perverted and insane pictorial art, lewd exhibitionistic dancing and jungle music form the spiritual norm of this sector of America’s youth.

 “Life as an Art”[3]

The course of superpersonal happenings is just as inevitable as the expression of its possibilities by the unfolding rosebud.

Within the men of action, deepest phenomenon of becoming, occurs the free will in the service of the destined. Freedom and necessity – to men of action this must remain a contradiction that they are free to do the necessary.

The question here is: what picture of Life is most suitable for the man of action?

It would be absurd to attempt to place my selection of such a picture on any other basis than that of taste – taste being in the last resort the true basis of even the most highly rationalized and mechanized philosophies.

Higher men and lower men – the few called to rule and the masses born in order that the higher men may actualize a grander destiny – differ in spirituality so much as they cannot be comprehended otherwise than as two different species. In all reverence it can be said that the lower men rely on God and the higher men on themselves. This basic natural hierarchy is the fundament upon which rests all practical philosophy of human nature. It must be definitively set forth.

This it is that distinguishes the higher natures- they have reverence for themselves; their own souls contain to them something precious which must be brought to fulfillment, for the higher natures have some of the attributes of superpersonal souls. Like history in its fulfillment laying waste human resources, denying and frustrating human wishes, reaching deep into private life to chasten souls with tragedy, the higher man deny and subordinate their own emotions, sacrifice their private lives, and all because there is something more important to them than all this: the mission.

I am aware that there are those who oppose the full blooming of the 20th century. The plaintive cries of these world-improvers will be drowned out by the tramp of marching feet. The slogan of equality, the watchword of the inferior, will disappear, and no one will even remember it. Life produced rationalism, and life has tired of it.

“Philosophy of Constitutional Law”[4]

This MS can be dated between 1937 and 1945. The latest references in Yockey’s bibliography are books published in 1937, and he refers to the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the present tense,[5] and specifically to the attempt by Roosevelt to enlarge the Supreme Court[6] in 1937. The Spenglerian influence is already evident, with his reference to the conflict between “Blood” and “Money” and the morphological nature of cultures.

Everywhere and always has law been the result of duties, whether the unwritten law of the Vikings or the megalopolitan law of Rome AD 100, is meant. Who owes the duties, to whom they are owed, their relative stringency, their administerers – these are all a reflection of the nation, the culture and the stage of development. A historical outlook on law perceives that the law does not order a life – it is the expression of the will-to-order of that life which precedes and forms the law. The development of law follows closely the spiritual, political, and economic growth of a people. If the development of the law were a thing unto itself all law of all times and places would be homogeneous at least in tendency. But the fact emerges that there is no legal sense in man divorced from the rest of his being.

. . . But a law is not born of an abstraction, but of life. The law itself contains in abstract form the legal world-picture of its authors. The law is established by a minority – the minority that represents the rest in world history. The duty conception of the higher natures is merely a potentiality in great mass of any social organization.  The idea of law merely enjoins upon all this duty conception – it makes explicit, actualizes, what is possible. It cannot create a nation out of a given mass – it can only embody in a given mandate and secure by sanction that which already exists, is being brought to existence, or which resides as permanent possibility in a super-personal soul . . .

Every law corresponds to a duty. A duty – to individuals, to family, to the state – is a law insofar as one does not receive it, but gives it.

During the period of the maturity of the absolute State arises a phenomenon of which the last development succeeds in dethroning the high sovereign of the State. The phenomenon is urban rationalism and its last development is the generic idea of “democracy.” The same type of kind that has busied itself with discovering the natural law for more than a century now sought out the “natural” government; the “natural” sovereign. From the middle of the 18th century the idea gestates and in 1789 it is triumphantly born into the world of actuality. Here is the background of the idea of the Constitution.

What the English understand by the word “constitution” is the exact opposite of what the same word conveys on the Continent – to the Englishman his constitution represents the organic link that binds the living past to the present – It is the focus of national tradition and national feeling. On the Continent however constitutionalism is the focal point if all anti-traditionary forces, the break with the past, the quintessence of all nationalistic efforts to destroy the State . . . The British Constitution is preserved history and affirmation of tradition – the Continental type of Constitution is the denial of history (as springing from rationalism) and the negation of tradition.

. . . A nation is not the creator of a culture, but is itself a grand creation of a Culture. The way to penetrate the soul of a nation is to live oneself into all the expressions of that soul, political, technical, and economic no less than artistic, religious, and philosophical . . . The basis of every nation is an idea – in the Goethian sense of that word. But that idea is a spiritual, and not as Darwin materialism thinks, as biological reality. Hence the dominant spirituality of the Culture at a given time, which is another way of saying that life-stage of the culture (whether youth, maturity or old age) determines what constitutes a nation.

Thoughts, Distilled from Memorandum

Imperialism now supplants the older word fascism. Fascism was still infused with petty-stateism to a greater or lesser degree.

The enemy is organized INTERNATIONALLY on all levels. For us to fail so to organize is to ensure that our several struggles, however gallant and heroic, will be severally doomed. It is simply the reign of terror in Europe that keeps Europeans out of active politics and in their homes.

October 1953

All of the intellectuals and critics who had read Spengler almost without exception have misunderstood him. They missed the highly important sentence: “What I have written here is true, that is, true for me and for the leading minds of the time to come.”  These scholarly idiots all put the question to themselves: Is this philosophy TRUE? Naturally in an age of criticism, nothing is considered subjectively true, as all the scholars, again almost without exception rejected Spengler, although all borrowed his method and his terminology and conclusions in great part to reach philosophical conclusions in perfect harmony with the Pollyanna spirit of 1900.

Anyone in the XXth century who thinks that a philosophy is objectively true or objectively false is an anachronism, an idiot. A belief is true if it makes us more efficient, more dangerous, more coordinated. In this sense Spengler is true – his philosophy corresponds to our deepest metaphysical instinct, makes us thus harmonious in feeling and in deed and in word.

“XXth Century Metaphysics”[7]

My philosophy – and incidentally also, that of the Spirit of the Age: The TRUE is that which I feel; the GOOD is that which I want; the BEAUTIFUL is that which pleases me.

There are five planes of becoming: the cosmic, the plant, the animal, the human, the High Cultural.

The “human race” is mostly not human – i.e. not only numerically does the animal element predominate, but in a given sample of large numbers, the animal plane predominates. Examples: obviously outside the Western Culture-area the animal plane dominates the human component in the “human race.” Let him who does not yet know this visit China, India, Africa, Islam. But in Europe itself, in any great city, for example, the greater part of the population is governed by animal needs and ideals, this IN FACT, but not in theory. In America, this is true also in theory.

Life and spirit are identical.

Superiority is an attempt; mediocrity is an accomplished fact.

Philosophy in the XXth century no longer has the obligation to present a system, but a picture.

Freud is a fairly truthful picture of the usual man; as is Marx; as is Darwin. The common denominator of these three vile systems is the equality idea. All three of these systems are, in their unconscious origins, revolts against superiority, aristocracy, culture. Darwinism says: “You see, with all your pride, you are only an ape.” Marx says, “all you superior ones are merely richer, and thieves at that, and we shall now expropriate you, and you shall be our servants. Freud said, “Even your proudest accomplishments are nothing but your sexual impulse.”

To Marx, the world is a huge money-bag; to Freud it is a dung-heap; to Darwin a zoo.

No parliamentary babbling or party politics are equal to our task, but only personalities, who know how to force themselves and their decisions through. Spengler from Introduction to Korherr’s Essay on the Decline of Births.

Woe to the general who comes onto the battlefield with a system. Napoleon.

“What is Behind the Hanging of the Eleven Jews in Prague?”

In 1952 the leadership of the Communist party in Czechoslovakia was tried and condemned for being Zionists in league with Israel and the USA. Yockey regarded this as an epochal turning point in the direction of the USSR, which would be the primary obstacle to American-Jewish world hegemony. The essay “What is behind the hanging of eleven Jewish in Prague?,” was issued as a mimeographed “press release” in the USA, dated December 20, 1952. It was republished in 1971 as part of the Four Essays collection.

To us in Europe, the trials are welcome; they clear the air. The opponents have now defined themselves. America recedes now to its proper position, that of the armourer and the technician, the world’s assembly line, the supplier of biological units called GI’s to whoever is situated to pull the appropriate strings – in the First World War, it was England, in the Second it was Jewry. As far as Europe is concerned, the Jewish leaders may as well pull down the Stars and Stripes and run up the Star of David.

The trials have made easier the task of the European Liberation Front. This Front was the first organ to warn Europe of the extinction in slavery promised to it by an alliance, supposedly with America, but actually with the Culture-State-Nation-People-Race of the Jew.

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.

Culture[8]

The dying out of culture is the dying out of the will-to-play, and its attenuation in ever-cruder games. The 19th century society said to itself: “let’s pretend that we are clockwork figures, and create our codes, our buildings, our dances, our inner lives accordingly.” The 20th century says: “Let’s pretend we are gangsters” – but what is the gangster –a savage desocialized, without the tabus of the savage. That is to say, for mere man to pretend to be a savage is no pretense, the game is thin. Almost the only play-element left in the gangsters’ code is the insistence on courage to be observed in the ideal gangster.

The 20th century finds the Baroque and the Gothic ornamentation in architecture silly. It stresses instead the “principle” that “function must govern form.” This is the ideal also of the aborigines and the Congo. This is the aggressive and deliberate declaration of war on culture.

In warfare, the 19th century to say nothing of the 18th – still treats war as a game with strictly permitted and forbidden measures, of which the fundamental principle was: civilians are excluded from warfare, both actively and passively: they may not fight, nor may they, as such, be made the object of war. This was still culture-warfare. Its last appearance was in the German conduct of the Second World War, and in that same War, it was brought to an end by American primitivity. American fliers, en masse and individually, made war solely against civilians AS SUCH, and individual fliers were instructed to murder even isolated civilians. In pursuance of these orders, American fliers murdered civilians fleeing from railroad trains, running in the streets, in parks, working in the fields. From this, there is no way back to culture-warfare.

“Thoughts Personal and Superpersonal”[9]

No European can ever know the precise quality and intensity of the love which a colonial brings to history and the works of the Western Culture. No matter how sensitive he is by nature, no matter how high the cultural-historical focus to which he can attain and hold, the European – and I have in mind just such beings as Goethe, Fichte, Carlyle, and Leonardo – must of necessity take many things for granted. The houses, the streets, the society, the universal diffusion of culture – he grows up in this atmosphere, having nothing with which to contrast it. . . .

A new type of love and affection can even arise in the colonial who returns to the soil of his spiritual origins. . . .

Absolute politics means politics between a Culture and extra-Cultural forces. This struggle for power is unmitigated, unconditioned, the total culture against the totality without. To such a struggle, the colonial brings the true, synthetic, creative feeling; for him the Culture is a perfect unity, while for the natives, the memories of past discords linger: Versailles versus Potsdam, Hapsburg versus Bourbon, Socialism versus Capitalism.

In one word: for the colonial who is capable of creative and appreciative feelings, the Culture is Religion. Culture embraces the totality, the soul of the organism, every event of its life, every product of its soul, every possibility it still contains of creation. Religion is the form of all awakening creative life; it is creation, it is youth. Religion is the formulation of the deepest feelings of harmony, which turn themselves into truths in the process of developing.

The feeling of Culture-as-Religion is the interim religion of Europe. . . .

The case of America shows better than anything the meaningless of the happenings outside the High Cultures. The monstrosity called America can intervene in Europe, can frustrate it, can perhaps destroy it. . . .

But this is the age wherein the higher man attains to a superpersonal plane on which he has never stood before, and never will again, for the religion and the existence of the higher man of Europe 1950–2050 is radically aristocratic.

“America’s Two Ways of Waging War”[10]

In 1951 Yockey was approached by a member of Joseph McCarthy’s staff and asked to write the Senator a speech. This association drew the attention of the FBI. The Bureau regarded the speech as the work of Senator McCarthy, but remained puzzled. However, it is apparent that Yockey was the author. This is evident by such phrases as Western Civilization as a “superpersonal force,” reference to the “inner enemy,” and the use of lower case when writing the names of “acheson” and “marshall” rather than capitalization of the first letter; a Yockeyism used in The Proclamation of London when referring to de gaulle and churchill, for example. While the speech probably was not used and perhaps not even seen by McCarthy, it is notable that Yockey’s theme was taken up by the conservative movement years later when describing the Vietnam War as a UN “no-win war.”[11] Another intriguing factor is that McCarthy did develop these themes that year in his book on Gen. Marshall.[12]

When the Second World War was finally brought about by the ultimatum to Japan which precipitated the Pearl Harbor attack, every cabinet minister was loud and positive about his support for the war. But when the war in Korea started, Secretary of State Acheson could not even be prevailed upon by the press to make a statement for several days . . .

Fellow Americans, look once more at the Second World War, the war against Germany. In selecting the leadership for that war, political and military, did our rulers select men with pro-German backgrounds, men who had dealt publicly and privately with Germany’s leadership? On the contrary, any such persons were purged at once from positions of leadership, and only pronounced anti-Germans were entrusted with conduct of the war against Germany. Regard now the present war against Red China, especially the moment of its beginning: in their theory, who are the participants in the war? The United States on the one side, the Republic of North Korea on the other. But who is entrusted with the conduct of the war, in theory? The Security Council of the United Nations – and in June 1950, at the beginning of the Korean War, this organ was presided over by a Russian delegate, the personal representative of Stalin . . .

. . . General MacArthur was disgracefully removed from command, and his offense was that he wanted to win the war. In very truth, America has two ways of waging war. One for victory and one for defeat.

It is not a part of the divine plan that a great superpersonal force working for order and creativeness in the world, like the Western Civilization, is to be overcome by an onslaught of barbarianism against an America weakened by corruption and betrayed by a horde of achesons.

The inner enemy, like the Red Chinese Armies in Korea, has not earned any of his victories. They have been presented to him by the marshals and the achesons.

The Thompson/Yockey Letters to Dean Acheson[13]

For four months during 1951–52 Maj. Gen. Otto E. Remer was jailed by the Bonn Government for criticising the post-war regime. In the USA Yockey’s primary colleague was H. Keith Thompson, who acted in the USA for Remer and his Socialist Reich Party. Yockey and Thompson met in 1952, and the correspondence they jointly addressed to US Secretary of State Dean Acheson on behalf of Remer, seems to be the first action of the Yockey-Thompson collaboration. The following are extracts from the second letter. The letters were written under Thompson’s name as Executive Secretary of the Committee for the Freedom of Maj. Gen. Remer.

October 15, 1952

You make the statement that Remer and the other leaders of the SRP are “neo-Nazi” in character. In the next sentence, you say Remer and the SRP leaders are not in league with what you call the “anti-communist parties.” While Remer was supporting the war of Europe against Bolshevist Russia those who today persecute him were hoping, and working, for the victory of Russia. In that war, you too supported Bolshevism against Europe, the heart, home-soil, head, brain and soul of Western Civilization. In this constellation of facts, no one can be heard to say that General Remer and the SRP are not anti-communistic. The spirit of the German National Socialist Revolution was the strongest anti-communist, anti-Bolshevist force to arise in Europe after the Bolshevist Revolution of Russia 1917. What you call the forces of democracy allied themselves with Bolshevist Russia, and stabbed the European armies in the back, and destroyed the power of Europe. And yet those European armies were fighting then for the entire Western Civilization, just as much as they would be tomorrow if they were to be reconstituted in their own spirit and under their own leadership. Under the hegemony of these “democratic forces,” Soviet Russia has increased steadily in world power. While the Resurgence of Authority was spreading itself over Europe however, Soviet Russia was steadily declining in world power . . .

The German National Socialist Movement was only one form, and a provisional form at that, of the great, irresistible movement which expresses the Spirit of our Age, the Resurgence of Authority. This movement is the affirmation of all the cultural drives and human instincts which liberalism, democracy and communism deny . . .

Notes

1. K. R. Bolton, Varange: The Life & Thoughts of Francis Parker Yockey (Renaissance Press, P O Box 1627 Paraparaumu Beach, Kapiti 5252, New Zealand, 1998).

2. Available from Renaissance Press, New Zealand.

3. South Bend, Indiana, December 1940.

4. A photocopy of this of variable quality can be obtained from this writer at Renaissance Press, New Zealand.

5. F. P. Yockey, “Philosophy of Constitutional Law,” p. 12.

6. F. P. Yockey, ibid., p. 13.

7. Circa early 1950s.

8. December 1953.

9. Circa early 1950s.

10. F. P. Yockey, America’s Two Ways of Waging War, 1951 (Kapiti, New Zealand: Renaissance Press, 2004).

11. See for example: Maj. Arch E Roberts, Victory Denied: Why Your Son Faces Death in No-Win Wars (Colorado: Committee to Restore the Constitution, 1972).

12. J. R. McCarthy, America’s Retreat from Victory, 1951 (Boston: Western Islands, 1965).

13. F. P. Yockey/H. K. Thompson Letters to Dean Acheson, 1952 (Kapiti, New Zealand: Renaissance Press, 2004).