So powerful, indeed, that men dare not speak its name above a whisper...

 

The rarest combination in man is that of the philosopher and man of action. When Yockey tried his hand at political organization he proved that he was no exception to the rule — or was it that the times then were too out of joint with the future for a constructive movement to be started? Organizing the European Liberation Front in 1949, he and friends issued a manifesto called The Proclamation of London. But outside of getting beaten up in Hyde Park, nothing much happened. And here again he encountered the old trouble. Even among the forward-looking intellectuals and individualists who were his co-workers, his brilliance shone through. He was resented, and the effort soon collapsed.

His money and immediate hopes gone, Yockey procured a job with the Red Cross. He resigned in 1951 and travelled throughout Europe.

In 1952 the State Department refused to renew his passport. Repeatedly, he applied; each time he was rejected. A game then developed between the FBI and Yockey, for the FBI had received orders to keep him under surveillance at all times. This is a pattern which has since become obvious to vigorous anti-communists in all parts of the United States, especially in the South. When Yockey’s whereabouts was known, the FBI would watch him night and day. When he dropped temporarily from sight, as he did frequently, his friends and relatives and contacts were constantly interrogated by agents who — they kept repeating — “just want to talk to him.”

And this was undoubtedly the truth. This is all they wanted to do. They just wanted to know where he was, what he was doing, whom he was seeing, what he was saying and where he was going next.

Why, you ask? Why all the interest in Francis Parker Yockey, author? He himself gave the answer to a friend. “My enemies have evaluated me better than my friends,” he said, and it was true.

And as I peered through the thick screens in the San Francisco Jail, and made out the indefinite shape on the other side, that tenth day of June, 1960, I knew that I would have to help the prisoner as best I could. I could do nothing else.

I have read your book, I said to the shadow, and I want to help you. What can I do?

Wait, he said. Wait, and do as your conscience tells you.

The following week was full of news of Yockey s appearance before Rabbi Joseph Karesh, the U.S. Commissioner.

Twice, I attended the hearings, and each time was fascinated by this man, Yockey. In stature he was about five feet, ten inches. He was light of weight, perhaps 145 pounds, and quick on his feet. His hair was dark, and starting to grey. The expression on his face — pensive, sensitive, magnetic — this was the unforgettable thing. It was his eyes, I think. Dark, with a quick and knowing intelligence. His eyes bespoke great secrets and knowledge and such terrible sadness. As he turned to leave, one time, those eyes quickly searched the room, darting from face to face with a sort of desperation, though the expression on his face of a determined resignation never wavered. What was he looking for? In that lions den, what else but a friendly countenance? As his gaze swept across, and then to me, he stopped and for the space of a fractional second, spoke to me with his eyes. In that instant we understood that I would not desert him.

Friday morning, June 17, I arose as usual. I heard the radio announcer pronounce words that stunned me.

Yockey was dead.

“I’ll sleep through ’til morning” was the cryptic message he gave his cellmate, last night. Was the morning he anticipated the dawn of a new age?

A garbled note was found. The coroner declared it suicide and said the poison was potassium cyanide. No one knew where he had gotten it. The case was closed.

As Americans, we have been taught from infancy to believe that we live in a free country. But times change, and America has become transformed in many ways. Often, the old formalities are observed, but the meaning and inner reality of America has changed, and no one saw this more clearly than Francis Parker Yockey. How the press, for example, loves to brag to its victims — its readers — about its freedom. Yes, the press may be free to lie and distort and suppress and deceive and malign, but is it free to tell the truth?

The spectacle of a man being persecuted, framed and driven to his death simply because he wrote a book is not one we would expect to see in the Twentieth Century in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But are we free when an American citizen whose only crime was to write a book is denied a passport by the State Department — a privilege which is given to all but the most notorious degenerates and criminals? It was not until April 24, 1962, that the State Department finally got around to beginning hearings to deny passports to the most important communists — but the “free press” somehow forgot to report at the time that no report of a confidential nature from the FBI or any other source would be used against a communist unless he was given the “right” of confrontation with his accuser. And, of course, the right of appeal would be scrupulously honored, even then.

Are we free when a citizen can be arrested without a warrant and held in jail without charges, but with the fantastic bail of $50,000 levied against him? Are we free when the vultures of the “free press” can swoop down upon the victim to heap calumny and scorn upon his head and accuse him of doing things he never did and saying things he never said in an effort to build up “public opinion” against him? Is America a free country when a sensitive genius can be held in the filthiest of jails with Negro and White criminals and is denied even clean clothes and a bath? Are we free when such a “criminal” is not allowed to see his sisters in private, and when a group which has supposedly been set up to defend the constitutional rights of citizens — the American Civil Liberties Union — would rather defend the “rights” of homosexuals, traitors, murderers and pornographers than a sincere patriot like Francis Parker Yockey, whose every thought and effort was in behalf of his fellow man? Are we free, I ask, when a judge can rule that a prisoner is not to have a “speedy and public trial by an impartial jury. . . ,” as guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, but, instead, must have a mental examination for the obvious purpose of eliminating a jury trial altogether? And finally, are we free when another group — vastly more powerful than the ACLU or the government itself — so powerful, indeed, that men dare not speak its name above a whisper, unless in terms of the most groveling praise — are we free when this group is able to dictate to the government the exact procedure which is to be used in disposing of troublemakers like Francis Parker Yockey?

If such things as I have enumerated can happen — and they did — then our vaunted “freedom” is a fake thing; an empty word given to us by our watchful masters to keep us amused and quiet — as a parent gives a shiny bauble to a child.

It is enlightening to review the standard means whereby our masters combat positive ideas and movements. There is a pattern in such tactics which constructive forces will do well to study. The first tactic is suppression and determined non-recognition of the rebel and his works. The press will unanimously give the well known “silent treatment.” Even at this early stage, if the movement gives promise of becoming significant, assassination is considered and carried out if possible. The murder of young Newton Armstrong, Jr., in San Diego, on the night of March 31, 1962, is a case in point. Quoting from Che Guevara’s s book on guerilla warfare and the question of when to resort to assassination:

It is generally against the policy of the Communist Party to resort to assassination … However, it requires two criteria and a high-level policy decision … The criteria for the individual in question are that he must be highly effective and it must serve some sort of example — some sort of a highly effective example.

The next tactic is the Smear through libel, distortion, misrepresentation and the sowing of confusion wherever possible. This may be a negative smear with the purpose of destroying the effectiveness of an enemy or a positive smear for the purpose of building a haze around the truth to enable a disintegrative movement to develop. The falsification of the truth about Castro which was indulged in by virtually all of the press and, of course, the State Department, is a classic example of this. The Smear is usually started as an underground whispering campaign that viciously builds up to an outright and overt campaign, with the “free press” called into play. The object is to isolate enemies of the present regime and discredit them. The third tactic is infiltration into the movement and/or the building up of false leadership in order to sabotage the movement at the optimum time, meanwhile diverting patriot energies into harmless or controlled activities. The fourth and final stage is called upon only as a last resort, after the movement or philosophy has become institutionalized and is immune to grosser tactics. This is to “interpret” it so as to bring it as closely as possible into conformity with approved patterns. (Characteristically, the conflicting philosophies of both Jesus Christ and Friedrich Nietzsche have suffered this deadening interpretation.) Two or more of the above maneuvers are usually used simultaneously. For instance, in addition to the suppression of his Imperium, Yockey was also victimized by the Smear; and he was also in danger of assassination — and his enigmatic end settled the problem. Now it is with no gift of prophecy that one may predict that this present republication of his work will call forth the same sequence.

I tell you that the injustice of it all is enough to drive one mad. How can a man stomach the cynical or ignorant drivel of the liberals as they whine for “freedom of speech” and “right to dissent” and shake their bony fists at “conformity” and all the rest of their legerdemain when one knows that these moral cripples and ethical perverts demand their peculiar freedoms only for those who are working to destroy the West? We have seen their reaction when one committed to saving the West is in need of some of their medicine.

It was like a certain wise, old reporter whispered to one of Yockey’s sisters as she slumped tearfully and quietly in her solitude. “Your brother is a martyr — the first of a long line of them — if we are to take back our country from those who have stolen it from us.”

A surprising word on the Yockey affair came some weeks after his death, and was provided by the tight-lipped silence of the man who had been charged with railroading him to the insane asylum, the United States Attorney. Suddenly, inexplicably, he resigned his job, left his wife and children and joined a monastery.

Let us assume that at least one devoted servant of the Democracy has a conscience, even if displayed a little late.

*  *  *

Please allow me to expose to you my prejudice so that there will be no misunderstanding. I favor the survival of our Western cultural organism. I love those who fight for the integrity of the West, whoever they may be. And, as much as I fear and mistrust the outer enemies of the West, I despise our inner enemies and the cowards who support them far more — and I hate their putrid doctrine that calls our continuing degradation “inevitable.”

Further, I believe that the West can survive. It all hinges on faith: faith in our future; faith in our superiority and survival. Skepticism, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, cynicism has destroyed the old faith, and it has not been replaced by a new one. But faith is and will always remain the essential ingredient in every historical force. Only a unifying faith can provide the common motivation for survival — the just and deep conviction of our right to live — and spark the single-minded and intolerant power which can clean and redeem our fast-decaying, rotting milieu. Very simply: the imperative of inspiring that faith is the central problem of our time.

And when I say, “survive,” I mean nothing more. For we are so far gone; our philosophies, liberties and cultural patterns are so perverted or eroded that bare survival is all that is possible. I mean to say that those who are to save the West must realize at the outset that only part of it can be saved; that much must be sacrificed and that the resulting structure will be different from the past. Those who have gone before have allowed the dank “winds of change” to corrode the old life, and many weeds have sprung up which cannot entirely be eliminated. It is one thing to fight for an attainable ideal, but another to sacrifice for a lost cause. In determining what is attainable and what is forever lost a philosophy of history is needed.

And although our job is to rebuild we must not lose sight of the reality, for we cannot rebuild until we have captured. Political power is the essential criterion, not wishes or windbags, and to the goal of political power all else must be temporarily sacrificed. To say less is to insure defeat. He who is on board a sinking ship in a storm may be required to throw all his possessions overboard if this is necessary for common survival. Or, to use another image:

Those who would guide the West back across the Styx and out of the dark must travel first through the gates of Hell.

The practical problem of the recapture of political power divides itself into other questions. For one, is it possible to formulate an ethic and faith which, in itself, offers at least as much popular attractiveness as the painted lie of Marx? For another, how can those who would naturally lead such a movement compete with the highly-developed Leninistic operational diabolism in the perpetually savage and untamable jungle of political warfare — or is it necessary to do so? After all, the conspiracy we face is the hideous monster spawned of four millenniums of experience in guile and deception; so much so, in fact, that its main ally always has been the obtuse blindness of those on whom it feeds. “Struggle” to a man of the West means bullets, armies, and aircraft carriers. But to our enemy, international wars are of little meaning; “struggle” to him means not war but politics, and accordingly he has perfected his weapons in this most decisive of areas. Soldiers have never made good politicians, and, by the nature of their respective crafts, the soldier must always lose to the man of politics.

Finally comes the main consideration in formulating such a doctrine: will it certainly eradicate the politico-social evils and diseases of our day and lead mankind toward a better world?

It is by this standard and no other that you will, if you are wise, judge the work of Francis Parker Yockey.

To quit the search for such an ethic is to abandon history like the intellectual and spiritual nihilists — the liberals and beatniks. To quit the search is to turn over to the inner enemy carte blanche control over our lives, souls and fate.

The failure to provide this philosophy is not alone the fault of the saprophytes among us, however. Nor is it only the fault of the chameleon-like inner enemy of the West (the Culture Distorter; to use Yockey’s apt term) which mercilessly persecutes and smashes all who dare to cry out against our rapid decline and degeneration; in all truth, it is mainly the fault of the many thousands who fully know the issues at stake yet have not the moral courage to identify and light the Culture Distorter; or — worse yet — who have, by diligent self-persuasion,convinced themselves that the battle for survival against an enemy that demands nothing less than total surrender can be fought and won with tax-deductible corporations, measured, “moderate” words and avoidance of “extremists.” These dainty combatants swarm over every anti-communist movement like ants on sugar. By shrilly demonstrating their anti-communism they bribe their consciences to give them peace and often go so far as to join in the crucifixion of those few with moral courage lest they, too, be adjudged “guilty” by association. America has too many of such anti-communists and too few real patriots.

W. A. CARTO ? Revilo Oliver?

Form Introduction to Imperium by Francis Parker Yockey