As one of Francis Parker Yockey’s closest colleagues, John Anthony Gannon, stated, one does not just ‘read’ Imperium or even fully comprehend its philosophy on the rationalistic level; one intuits Yockey’s thought. Imperium appeals to a different faculty of perception in a manner that books like DasKapital or The Wealth of Nations never could. The closest parallel is the immediate connection one might feel with the Bible, Koran or Bhagavad Gita. Imperium is an act of Faith and Yockey wrote it for that Faith, which cannot be comprehended through the ‘wisdom of this world’ alone, in St. Paul’s words, but which requires rather a feeling for the ebb and flow of History. It is a Faith for which Yockey died. Because it is one of feeling with the blood, it lies outside the ken of the liberal intelligentsia, political pundits and those who can only weigh and measure in all things.
This is why Yockey was rejected even by much of the ‘Right’ that can only weigh and measure, particularly in regard to ‘race’. Ironically, while his most vehement critics were the Hitlerites of the Anglophone world, it was German veterans who were quick to appreciate Yockey. His philosophy is based on a German rather than an English worldview, the former being metaphysical, the latter materialistic or mercantile. Referring to a worldview as ‘German’ or ‘English’ indicates the time and space from which that worldview was given birth, not necessarily the nationality of the person expressing the new world-feeling. As Spengler pointed out, there are Germans who are imbued with the worldview of the English (those whom he and Yockey called the Michel element) and British such as Carlyle who embody the ‘German’ or, as Spengler put it, ‘Prussian’ spirit of the new epoch. Fortunately, there were some on the ‘Right’ in the Anglophone world who saw the fundamental value of Yockey’s added perception in thinking — his Cultural Vitalism.
Yockey commences where Spengler stopped. To Spengler’s cultural morphology, or the organic lifecycles of High Cultures, Yockey explained the factors of Culture-distortion, Culture-retardation and Culture-parasitism. This added faculty in perception enables us to see how pathologies work within the cultural organism and what antibodies are required to form a resistance, enabling the High Culture to proceed with its organic lifespan. Whatever else of Yockeyan thought might become historically passé, Cultural Vitalism will remain valid for the foreseeable future, or at least as long as there exists a culture-bearing stratum capable of discernment.
Moreover, while Spengler ended his final work, The Hour of Decision, with a clarion call for Western resistance, Yockey provided the fighting creed for Western resurgence, enlisting Spengler’s morphology in active resistance against the forces of cultural pathology.
‘Fascism’ is referred to herein. The word is problematic because it has been ill-defined by academics at best. However, Yockey had no problem with the word. His close American colleague H Keith Thompson referred to himself in a series of articles as an ‘American Fascist’. The European Liberation Front newsletter Frontfighter often used the word Fascist self-descriptively. If one wants a definition of Fascism then perhaps the obvious place to look would be original sources such as The Doctrine of Fascism by Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, or insightful post-war assessments by those directly involved, such as Maurice Bardèche. Certainly, nothing is to be gained, other than sheer entertainment, from those who define ‘Fascism’ as anything and everything from General Pinochet to Donald Trump. Fortunately, in recent decades there have been some credible attempts by orthodox academics to define a ‘generic Fascism’ and the Israreli scholar Zeev Sternhell1 and the Oxford scholar Roger Griffin are among the most worthwhile. 2
Fascism was an answer to cultural crisis and moral decline. Fascism reasserted that the nation is an organic social unit, not a collection of individualities following separate ego-interests, whether in the form of the atomistic-individualism of Liberalism or the class-conflict of Marxism. This commonality of interests within a territory forms a ‘people’ and the unifying mechanism of that people is the State. The place of this people-nation-state in History will depend on geographic locality and the vicinity and types of other people-nation-states.
Fascism arose as an answer to the crisis of decline in nations after the cataclysm of World War I. Because of the universality of the crisis within Western Civilization, Fascism took on universal aspects despite its nationalism. Mussolini looked to the twentieth century as ‘the Fascist century’. Certain idealists within the Fascist movements saw a new Europe emerging that would be united by an Idea and a Faith but would not be subjected to any one nation. The Waffen SS, with its foreign legions that came to outnumber the Germans in its ranks, was seen by many as a new European order in embryo. However, within Fascism there remained the counter-force of nineteenth-century national-chauvinism. Fascism was defeated by the combination of Eastern hordes mechanised with Western technics. Oswald Spengler had warned of this prospect in The Hour of Decision.
Many of those who survived the mass lynchings, ‘denazification’ and starvation of occupied Europe in the aftermath of World War II saw that the error of Fascism was that it had too often remained ‘national’ rather than pan-European. Europe stood prostrate between two non-Western powers, the USA and the USSR. It was debatable for many after the war as to which of these posed the greater menace. New movements soon emerged to fight for a united Europe. Into this milieu stepped a young American lawyer named Yockey, ostensibly as part of the anti-European occupation forces, imbued with the European spirit and with an Idea for the post-war era. Some saw him as an upstart — but nobody could deny his brilliance.
Yockey saw in Fascism a ‘provisional’ form of the embryonic Western Imperium. Indeed, he regarded the word ‘Imperialist’ as more aptly describing what was required to set a derailed Western Civilization back on the path of its destiny. This was not the imperialism of the nineteenth century, nor of any one particular colonial power, let alone the neo-imperialism of the USA, but the imperialism of Western Civilization as an organic unity. From Spengler, Yockey adopted the morphology of culture lifecycles. However, Yockey added an invaluable factor to this, that of Cultural Vitalism. This describes how a culture-organism can be infected with pathologies like any other organism. Spengler had stated that a Civilization declines when at an advanced state of life it becomes thoroughly imbued with money-thinking. Then all values and arts can be bought and sold like commodities. This process describes the stage when a Civilization is opened to corruption. Yockey proceeded from this premise and added Cultural Vitalism to explain the manner by which pathogens are able to enter late-stage Civilization through Culture-distortion, Culture-retardation and Culture-parasitism.
Without succumbing to dogmatism, we can for the moment say that these laws of culture morphology and culture pathology will remain as valid as the laws of physics for as long as there are High Cultures and humanity is not reduced to a nebulous mass of Fellaheen primitives on a global scale. The ‘evidence’ is here for all who have eyes to see, all who are able to sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with a Civilization that once produced Shakespeare but now produces sitcom scriptwriters; that once birthed Beethoven and Mozart but now lauds Lady Gaga; whose culture-bearing stratum, which once patronized Leonardo, has been replaced by art dealers and Saatchis peddling Jeff Koon or Ofili. All of these symptoms of Culture pathology are excused or applauded in the name of ‘progress’. What Spengler and Yockey showed is that none of this is ‘progress’; it is a mere reversion towards decay over thousands of years, of the same type that afflicted prior Civilizations. If a Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Hindu, Arab or Chinese was time-transported from the era of decline of his respective Civilization into our own, he would see ours as remarkably familiar and might proffer an unheeded warning.
In 1998, I made an effort to write a biography of Yockey with the limited resources of the time and included some hitherto unpublished MSS and some newspaper articles on Yockey’s capture and death. 3 This was a year prior to the publication of Kevin Coogan’s Dreamer of the Day. 4 Since that time there have been new, de lux editions of Imperium and The Proclamation of London published by Wermod & Wermod, under the direction of Alex Kurtagic, who also provided hitherto unpublished family background on Yockey. 5 I had the honour of writing the introduction to the Wermod edition of Imperium.
But why the need for another biography on Yockey, given Coogan’s exhaustive research? I hope that the reader will soon find that this biography and Coogan’s are very different. Firstly, I have endeavoured to place Yockey’s life and thought in historical, political and social contexts. Secondly, I have added much material to the basic facts. This is a book that should have been written by Keith Stimely, who spent much of the 1980s interviewing Yockey’s old friends and colleagues, collating a large corpus of material. Tragically, his early death robbed him of the opportunity to start work on the biography itself. Since that time, important sources and people have passed away, including John Anthony Gannon, who did much to tell the Yockey story to Stimely, and Elsa Dewette and Peter Huxley-Blythe. Moreover, the extensive archives of DTK, the publisher of Yockey: Four Essays and of the Yockeyan magazine TRUD during the 1970s, were sunk by Hurricane Katrina. His insights have been of much help. Thanks to another veteran activist, Martin Kerr, for facilitating the communication.
Kerry Bolton
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