by Greg Johnson
It is only then, in the autumnal or crepuscular phase of a cycle, that the nations disappear and great supranational aggregates are born, under the mark of a pseudo-Caesarism, of a centralized personal power, in itself formless, lacking a superior chrism. All this is only a twisted and inverted image of the Imperium in the traditional and genuine sense; it is not empire, but “imperialism,” and, in the Spenglerian view, it represents a last flash, which is followed by the end—the end of a culture, which may be followed by a new and different one without any link of continuity with the precedent.
Now, when Varange speaks of the new period of “absolute politics” and of the blocs which, once the nations of the same culture are absorbed into a single organism, should have as their sole desideratum that of the absolute, existential distinction of enemy and friend (a view taken from Carl Schmitt, who had defined in these terms the essence of the purely political modern units) and of the pure biological imperative, we still remain on the plane of “Zivilisation” and of collectivistic, “totalitarian” processes, to be judged more as subnational than as really supranational, whose closest and most consistent realization today can be found in the realm of Stalinism.
Now, it is clear that if the unity of Europe can realize itself only in these terms, i.e., by means of its own brute strength, then the West can perhaps resist the world and reassert itself materially or biologically, as against the extra-European imperialistic powers, but, at the same time, it will have renounced its own interiority, and this will be the end of Europe, of the European tradition; it will become a facsimile of its opponents, a mere product of the plane of the struggle of a brute will to existence and power, under the sway of the general factors of disintegration peculiar to the technicist-mechanicist “Zivilisation” which will subsequently overtake all. This is more or less the prognosis made also by Burnham in his consideration of the eventual results of what he calls “the managerial revolution” at work.10
What other possibilities are there? It is not easy to say. As far as the nations are concerned, each can maintain its actual individuality and the dignity of an organic “partial whole,” while at the same time subordinating itself to a superior order, only under the conditions already indicated: that is, if a really superior authority, one which is not simply political, and which cannot be monopolized by any individual nation in terms of “hegemonism,” is directly recognized by it. The alternative which is defined in material terms of usefulness and external necessity is merely extrinsic and quite trivial. The current “authorities” speak willingly of European tradition, of European culture, of Europe as an autonomous organism, and so forth, but unfortunately, when we consider things as they really are, in the light of absolute values, we see that there is little more to this than slogans and sententiousness. Where, then, can we find an avenue of approach to the higher possibility?
On a higher plane, the soul for a European supranational bloc would have to be religious: religious not in an abstract sense but with reference to a precise and positive spiritual authority. Now, even leaving aside the more recent and general processes of secularization and of laicization which have occurred in Europe, nothing like this exists today on our continent. Catholicism is merely the belief of some European nations—and besides we have seen how, in an incomparably more favorable period than the present one, namely the post-Napoleonic one, the Holy Alliance, with which the idea of a traditional and manly solidarity of the European nations dawned, was such only nominally. It lacked a true religious chrism, a universal, transcendent, idea. If in the same way the “new Europe” were to offer only a generic Christianity, it would be too little. It would be something too shapeless and uniform, not exclusively European, which could not be monopolized by European culture. What is more, some doubts cannot but arise regarding the reconcilability of pure Christianity with a “metaphysics of the empire,” as is shown by the medieval conflict between the two powers,11 if this conflict is understood in its true terms.
Let us leave this plane and pass to the cultural plane. Can we speak today of a differentiated European culture? Or, better, of a spirit which remains unique throughout its various and syntonic expressions in the cultures of the individual European nations? Again, it would be foolhardy to answer in the affirmative, for the reason Christoph Steding has shown in a well-known book entitled The Reich and the Disease of European Culture.12 This reason lies in what this author calls the neutralization of the present culture, a culture no longer appropriate to a common political idea, confined to the private realm, transitory, cosmopolitan, disorientated, anti-architectonic, subjective, neutral, and formless overall because of its scientistic and positivistic aspects. To ascribe all this to a “culture pathology,” to an outward and fleeting action of “distortion” by alien elements, as Varange would hold to be the cause of this state of affairs, not only for Europe, but even for America, is rather simplistic.
In general, where can a cultural base differentiated enough to be able to oppose itself seriously to the “alien,” the “barbarian,” be found today, in this phase of “Zivilisation,” and where could it be found in the case of previous imperial spaces? We would have to go a long way back, in our work of cleansing and of reintegration, to arrive at such a base, because, although we are certainly right to judge aspects of both the North American and the Russian-Bolshevik civilizations as barbarian and anti-European, we cannot lose sight of the fact that these aspects themselves represent, in both the former and the latter, the extreme development of tendencies and evils which first manifested themselves in Europe.
It is precisely in this that the reason of the weak immunity of the latter against them lies.
Finally, in the situation we are reduced to today, even as far as “tradition” is concerned, there is a misunderstanding. It has already been a long time since the West knew what “tradition” was in the highest sense; the anti-traditional spirit and the Western spirit have been one and the same thing since as early as the period of the Renaissance. “Tradition,” in the complete sense, is a feature of the periods which Vico would call “heroic ages”—where a sole formative force, with metaphysical roots, manifested itself in customs as well as in religion, in law, in myth, in artistic creations, in short in every particular domain of existence. Where can the survival of tradition in this sense be found today? And, specifically, as European tradition, great, unanimous, and not peasant or folkloric, tradition? It is only in the sense of the leveling “totalitarianism” that tendencies towards political-cultural absolute unity have appeared. In concrete terms, the “European tradition” as culture has nowadays as content only the private and more or less diverging interpretations of intellectuals and scholars in fashion: of this, yesterday, the “Volta Congresses”13 and, today, various initiatives of the same type have given sufficient and distinctly unedifying proofs.
From these considerations and others of the same kind, we reach a single, fundamental conclusion: a supranational unity with positive and organic features is not conceivable in a period of “Zivilisation.” In such a period, what is conceivable, at the limit, is the melting of nations into a more or less formless power bloc, in which the political principle is the ultimate determinant and subordinates to itself all moral and spiritual factors, either as the “telluric” world of the “world revolution” (Keyserling), or as the world of “absolute politics” in the service of a biological imperative (Varange), or again as totalitarian complexes in the hands of managers (Burnham), all of which have already become matters of common experience. Unity in function of “tradition” is something very different from this.
Should we then reach a negative conclusion regarding the situation and content ourselves with a more modest, federalist, “social” or socialistic idea? Not necessarily, because, once the antithesis is noted, all we really need to do is to orientate ourselves accordingly. If it is absurd to pursue our higher ideal in the context of a “Zivilisation,” because it would become twisted and almost inverted, we can still
recognize, in the overcoming of what has precisely the character of “Zivilisation,” the premise for every really reconstructive initiative. “Zivilisation” is more or less equivalent to the “modern world,” and, without deluding ourselves, it is necessary to acknowledge that, with its materialism, its economism, its rationalism, and the other involutive and dissolutive factors, the West—let us say Europe—is eminently responsible for the “modern world.” In the first place, a revival needs to take place which would have an effect upon the spiritual plane, awakening new forms of sensibility and of interest, and so also a new inner style, a new fundamental homogeneous orientation of the spirit. To this effect, it is necessary to realize that it is not just a matter of, as Varange would have it, going beyond the 19th-century vision of life in its various aspects, because this vision is itself the effect of more remote causes. Then, as regards the biological interpretation of culture by Spengler, precise reservations must be made; above all we must refrain from believing, with the author that we have considered, in an almost inevitable revival which would be heralded by various symptoms. In fact, we must avoid leaning beyond measure on the ideas of the revolutionary and reforming movements of yesterday, since the fact is that different tendencies, sometimes even contradictory tendencies, were present in them, which could only have attained any positive form if circumstances had allowed these movements to develop totalistically, whereas in actuality they were crushed by their military defeat.
Overall, politically speaking, the crisis of the principle of authority seems to us to constitute the most serious difficulty. Let us repeat that we speak of authority in the true sense, which is such as to determine not only obedience, but also natural adherence and direct recognition. Only such authority can lead the elements within a nation to overcome individualism and “socialism,” and, in the pan-European area, to reduce the nationalistic hubris, the “sacred prides,” and the stiffening of the principle of individual state sovereignty, in a manner better than mere necessity or circumstantial interest can do. If there is something specifically peculiar to the Aryo-Western tradition it is the spontaneous joining together of free men proud of serving a leader who is really such. The only way to a real European unity is via something which repeats on a large scale such a situation, of a “heroic” nature, not that of a mere “parliament” or a facsimile of a joint stock company.
This brings into view the mistake of those who admit a sort of political agnosticism to the European idea, thus reducing it to a kind of formless common denominator: a centre of crystallization is needed, and the form of the whole cannot but reflect itself in that of the parts. On a background which is not that of “civilization,” but that of tradition, this form can only be the organic-hierarchical one. The more integration along those lines occurs in each of the partial—that is, national—areas, the more we will approach supranational unity.
The fact that numerous external pressures are now clearly perceptible, so that for Europe to unite is a matter of life or death, must lead to the acknowledgment of the inner problem which must be resolved to give to an eventual European coalition a solid base, which as explained above has a double aspect: on one hand, it is the problem of the gradual and real overcoming of what is characteristic of a period of “Zivilisation”; on the other hand, it is the problem of a sort of “metaphysics” by which an idea of pure authority, at once national, supranational, and European, can be justified.
This double problem brings us back to a double imperative. We must see what men are still standing among so many ruins who are able to understand and accept this imperative.
A CONTEMPORARY EVALUATION
OF FRANCIS PARKER YOCKEY
KERRY BOLTON
_____________________
“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 Yockey14
Francis Parker Yockey (a.k.a. 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 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 biography15and is discussed at length in Martin Lee’s book on “neo-Nazism.”16 This writer’s Renaissance Press also carries a range of Yockey materials including hitherto unpublished manuscripts.17 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.18
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,19 while the historical 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,20 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 the West was “great and good”—although by then redundant philosophically;21 Yockey was not well received by American National Socialist George Lincoln Rockwell, who condemned “Yockeyism” as “dangerous” and “evil.” On the other hand, James Madole of the National Renaissance Party was very much influenced by Yockey’s ideas.22
For 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.”23
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 United States 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.”24
As Yockey saw it, the primary problem with Moscow’s Bolshevism at the time was its leadership of a world colored revol
t against the white world, reminiscent of Spengler’s scenario in The Hour of Decision.25 However, Yockey, like many German war veterans such as Major General 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.26
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,27 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.28
In fact, as Yockey now discerned, the break between Moscow and New York came 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,29 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.