Editor’s note: Below we reproduce Kerry Bolton’s eight-thousand word ‘A contemporary assessment of Francis Parker Yockey’, originally published in three instalments in Counter-Currents in September and October 2010.
“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book on “neo-Nazism.”[3] This writer’s Renaissance Press also carries a range of Yockey materials including hitherto unpublished manuscripts.[4] Christian Bouchet in France carries material by and about Yockey, and Alfonso De Filippi’s Italian translation of The Proclamation of London in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-visChina 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.”
Yockey and Huxley on “soft” totalitarianism
Understanding Yockey’s views of American “ethical syphilis” and “spiritual leprosy” is aided by a familiarity of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World.[25] Huxley was much more prescient than Orwell and quite precisely described how “world controllers” would impose a global dictatorship not by force of arms, but by the slavery of “pleasure.” The ready availability of sex and drugs would be used to create a narcotized society where everyone is happy with his servile lot. Appraising Brave New World in 1958, Huxley described the regime as:
A world-state in which war has been eliminated and where the first aim of the rulers is at all cost to keep their subjects from making trouble. This they achieve by (among other methods) legalizing a degree of sexual freedom (made possible by the abolition of family) that practically guarantees the Brave New Worlders against any form of destructive (or creative) emotional tension. [26]
In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.[27]
A drug called “Soma” maintains social conditioning. Huxley calls this drugged state “not a private vice” but “a political institution.”[28]
It was the very essence of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. But this most precious of the subjects’ inalienable privileges was at the same time one of the most powerful instruments of rule in the dictator’s armory. The systematic drugging of the individuals for the benefit of the State… was a main plank in the policy of the World Controllers… [29]
In Brave New World, population control is enforced and non-reproductive sex, including mass orgies, or “orgy-porgys” where participants go into a frenzy induced by narcotics and repetitive rhythms.[30] These orgies also serve as religious rites or “solidarity” events.
Yockey had a similar understanding of the workings of soft totalitarianism. In The Proclamation of London, he writes:
The degradation of social life did not merely happen, it was planned, deliberately fostered and spread, and the systematic undermining of the entire life of the West continues today.
The instruments of this assault and the weapons of propaganda, press, radio, cinema, stage, education. These weapons are controlled at this moment in Europe almost entirely by the forces of Culture-disease and social degeneration.
The “chief fount” is Hollywood, which “spews forth an endless series of perverted films to debase and degenerate the youth of Europe” after having successfully destroyed the youth of America.[31]
Concomitantly “a vicious literature” promotes the “destruction of healthy individual instincts, of normal familial and sexual life, of disintegration of the social organism into a heap of wandering, colliding, grains of human sand.”
The message of Hollywood is the total significance of the isolated individual, stateless and rootless, outside of society and family, whose life is the pursuit of money and erotic pleasure. It is not the normal and healthy love of man and wife bound together by many children that Hollywood preaches, but a diseased erotic-for-its-own sake, the sexual love of two grains of human sand, superficial and impermanent. Before this highest of all Hollywood’s values everything else must stand aside: marriage, honor, duty, patriotism, sternness dedication to self to a higher aim. This ghastly distortion of sexual life has created the erotomaia that obsesses millions of victims in America, and which has now been brought to the Mother-soil of Europe by the American invasion.[32]
Keep in mind that Yockey was writing this in 1948, not last month, or even a decade ago. We now look back on the era Yockey was describing with such misgivings and consider it a time of innocence and purity in comparison to our own. Who can deny that this process of “social degeneration” has multiplied beyond the ability to calculate?
Yockey also wrote of the rise of “feminism” at a time when we would now barely recognize any such thing as “feminism” in comparison to our own day:
Hollywood-feminism has created a woman who is no longer a woman but cannot be a man, and a man who is devirilized into an indeterminate thing. The name given to this process is “the setting from” of woman and it is done in the name of “happiness,” the magic word of the liberal-communist-democratic doctrine.[33]
Yockey died on the eve of the 1960s with its manufactured “cultural revolution.” Yet he surely would have regarded the counter culture’s sexual liberation, feminism, and drug use not as a “revolution” against the US establishment, but merely as a phase of its pursuit of world domination through the destruction of traditional culture and morals.
The Cultural Cold War
The origins and implementation of the strategy can now be historically traced with great precision. The seeds of the 1960s were planted as early as 1949, at the start of the Cold War, when Stalin gave the first indications that he was not going to continue the wartime alliance as a subordinate partner in a United Nations-based World State.
The CIA, with funding from the Rockefellers and the like, gathered a gaggle of old Trotskyites, Mensheviks, and other Leftists disaffected with Stalin’s uncouth Slavic “Bolshevism.” The result was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) under the direction of “lifelong Menshevik” Prof. Sidney Hook (who would be awarded the Medal of Freedom by Pres. Reagan, for services to US hegemony), along with his old mentor Dr John Dewey,[34] and luminaries such as Bertrand Russell (who once advocated a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR to ensure “world peace”), Stephen Spender, and Arthur Koestler. “Counter-culture rebels” recruited by the US Establishment at the same time included Gloria Steinem[35] and Timothy Leary.[36]
The founding conference of the CCF was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1949, as a provocation to a Soviet-sponsored peace conference at the Waldorf supported by a number of American literati. The CIA article on this states:
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sidney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the [pro-Soviet] Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist [should read anti-Stalinist] himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.[37]
Through the CCF, the CIA was able to control much of the cultural life of the West during the Cold War era, and subsidized influential magazines such as Encounter.[38]
When the CCF was shut down after the implosion of the Soviet bloc, other institutions were established, this time under private auspices, including in particular the Soros network[39] and the National Endowment for Democracy, the latter another collaboration between neo-Trotskyites,[40] the US Government, and neo-conservatives; both Soros and NED working in tandem to create revolutions, much like the manipulated “youth revolts” of the 1960s, to install regimes favorably disposed to globalization and privatization, especially in the former Soviet bloc.
The cultural front remains pivotal to the expansion of American global hegemony, the spreading of cultural pathology being far more insidious and intrusive than bombs or even debt, as Yockey was among the first to warn, while much of the rest of the “Right” including Rockwell’s American Nazis aligned themselves with the US Establishment vis-à-vis the USSR and American hegemony.
While America sought to export its lethal “culture” in the form of jazz and Abstract Expressionism, to cite two primary examples, Stalin condemned “rootless cosmopolitanism” and was thus fully aware of the consequences of America’s cultural exports. Indeed “Abstract Expressionism” became the de facto “state art” of the American regime of the “culture distorters,” just as “socialist realism” was the de jure state art of the USSR.
Abstract Expressionism was the first specifically so-called “American” art movement. Jackson Pollock, the central figure, was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He had worked in the Federal Artist’s Project, 1938–42, along with other Leftist artists, painting murals under Roosevelt’s New Deal regime, or what Yockey called the second “1933 Revolution.”[41] Abstract Expressionism became the primary artistic strategy of the Cold War offensive against the “socialist realism” sponsored by the USSR from the time of Stalin. As in much else, Stalin reversed the original Bolshevik tendencies in the arts, which had been experimental and, as one would expect from Marxism, anti-traditional.[42] On the other hand, Social Realism, which had been the popular American art form until the 1930s, was by the late 1940s being displaced as art critics and wealthy patrons began to promote the Abstract Expressionists.[43]
Many of the theorists, patrons, and practitioners of Abstract Expressionism were Trotskyists or other anti-Stalinist Leftists, who were to become the most ardent Cold Warriors. Modernist art during the Cold War became a factor in the USA’s world revolution. In 1947 the US State Department organized a modernist exhibition called “Advancing American Art” which was intended for Europe and Latin America, reaching as far as Prague.[44]
The two individuals who did most to promote Abstract Expressionism were art critic Clement Greenberg and wealthy artist and art historian Robert Motherwell[45] who was vigorous in propagandizing on the subject. Greenberg was a New York Trotskyite and a long-time art critic for The Partisan Reviewand The Nation. He had first come to the attention of the art world with his article in The Partisan Review, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in 1939,[46] in which he stated that art was a propaganda medium, and condemned the socialist realism of Stalinist Russia and the volkisch art of Hitler’s Germany.[47]
Greenberg was a particular enthusiast for Jackson Pollock, and in a 1955 essay “American Type Painting,”[48] he lauded Abstract Expressionism and its proponents as the next stage of modernism. Greenberg considered that after World War II the US had become the guardian of “advanced art,” just as others were to regard America as the only genuine vehicle for a “world revolution” as a stage for world socialism, as opposed to the USSR.
Greenberg became a founding member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF)[49] and was involved with “executive policymaking.”[50] He continued his support for the CCF even after the 1966 exposé by the NY Timesand Ramparts that the CCF and magazines such as Encounter had been sponsored by the CIA. Typical of a good Trotskyite, he continued to work for the US State Department and the US Department of Information. [51]
Another key institution in the service of culture distortion is the Rockefeller dynasty’s Museum of Modern Art. John J. Whitney, formerly of the US Government’s Psychological Strategy Board, was a trustee of the Museum, and he supported Pollock and other modernists.[52]
Note the connection with psychological warfare. William Burden, who joined the museum as chairman of its Advisory Committee in 1940, worked with Nelson Rockefeller’s Latin American Department during the war. Burden had been president of the CIA’s Farfield Foundation which channeled funds to sundry fronts and lackeys; and in 1947 he was appointed chairman of the Committee on Museum Collections, and in 1956 as MoMA’s president. [53] Other corporate trustees of MoMA were William Paley of CBS, and Henry Luce of Time-Life Inc. both of whom assisted the CIA.[54] Joseph Reed, Gardner Cowles, Junkie Fleischmann, and Cass Canfield were all simultaneously trustees of MoMA and of the CIA’s Farfield Foundation. There were numerous other connections between the CIA and the museum, including that of Tom Braden, who had been executive secretary of the museum through 1947–1949 before joining the CIA.[55]
In 1952 MoMA launched its world revolution of Abstract Expressionism via the International Program which had a five year annual grant of $125,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, under the direction of Porter McCray, who had also worked with Nelson’s Latin American Department, and in 1950 as an attaché of the cultural section of the US Foreign Service.[56] Russell Lynes, writing of this period stated that MoMA now had the entire world to “proselytize” with what he called “the exportable religion” of Abstract Expressionism.[57]
Communism is gone, but the cultural Cold War continues, now packaged as the “liberation” of states deemed not suitably “democratic.” America has its own version of Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” which US strategists call “constant conflict.” Maj. Ralph Peters, a prominent military strategist, formerly with the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, appears to have coined the term. Peters has written of this in an article by that name. Peters’ statements definitively show “culture distortion” to be a contrived strategy for global domination; he reminds us that the regime of the culture distorter now has at its disposal technology far more powerful and pervasive than the cinema and literature of Yockey’s time:
We have entered an age of constant conflict…
We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent.
Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure… The attempt of the Iranian mullahs to secede from modernity has failed, although a turbaned corpse still stumbles about the neighborhood. Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its children. Our victims volunteer.[58]
Peters is stating that this “global information empire” led by the USA is “historically inevitable.” This “historical inevitability” is classic Marx, just as “constant conflict” is classic Trotsky. This is a “cultural revolution,” which is buttressed by American firepower. Peter continues:
It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry “American culture,” with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites–figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians–human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people’s culture. It stresses comfort and convenience–ease–and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx’s dream, and his nightmare. (Emphasis added).
Peters’ zealous messianic prophecies for the “American Century” are reminiscent of Huxley’s Brave New World where the masses are kept in servitude not by physical force but by mindless narcosis, by addiction to the puerile, everything that is, in a word, “American” since the “Second American Revolution of 1933.” Peters continues:
Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can’t wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather “Baywatch.” America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no “peer competitor” in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted–men and women everywhere–clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment. (Emphasis added).
The “constant conflict” is one of world Cultural Revolution, with the armed forces used as backup against any reticent state, as in the cases of Serbia and Iraq. The world is therefore to be kept in a state of flux, with a lack of permanence, which Peters’ calls Americas’ “strength,” as settled traditional modes of life do not accord with the aim of industrial, technical, and economic Darwinian linear historical “progress without end.” Peters continues:
There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.” (Emphasis added).
Peters refers to certain cultures trying to reassert their traditions, and again emphasizes that this universal culture distortion that is being imposed is one of Huxleyan “infectious pleasure.” The historical inevitability is re-emphasized, as the “rejectionist” (sic) regimes will be consigned to what in Trotsky’s term is the “dustbin of history.” What Yockey called “culture distortion” is even more forcefully described by Peters as an “infection.”
Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened identities–usually with marginal, if any, success–and yes, they are attempting to escape our influence. But American culture is infectious, a plague of pleasure, and you don’t have to die of it to be hindered or crippled in your integrity or competitiveness. The very struggle of other cultures to resist American cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of the future. We should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their peoples’ failure, while further increasing our relative strength. (Emphasis added).
Michael Ledeen (formerly a consultant with the US National Security Council, State Department and Defense Department, now with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, another outfit that works for “regime change”) in similar terms to that of Peters, calls on the USA to fulfill its “historic mission” of “exporting the democratic revolution” throughout the world. Like Peters, Ledeen predicates this world revolution as a necessary part of the “war on terrorism,” but emphasizes also that “world revolution” is the “historic mission” of the USA and always has been. Writing in the “neo-conservative” National Review, Ledeen states:
We are the one truly revolutionary country in the world, as we have been for more than 200 years. Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically, and that is precisely why the tyrants hate us, and are driven to attack us. (Emphasis added).
Like Peters, Ledeen is affirming a fundamental principle of cultural morphology as the study of the life of a culture as an organism, when he refers to the “destructive mission” of America as being something that it does “automatically” (sic); that is to say, that it is the innate characteristic of the American cultural organism to behave in such a manner; an inner organic imperative.
Freedom is our most lethal weapon, and the oppressed peoples of the fanatic regimes are our greatest assets. They need to hear and see that we are with them, and that the Western mission is to set them free, under leaders who will respect them and preserve their freedom.
Ledeen refers to a mission, hence it is seen in such quarters as being of a messianic nature, but of course Ledeen like all other apologists for the global hegemony of culture distortion describes this as a “Western mission,”(sic) which is a complete misnomer, and one calculated to deceive, just like the USA was heralded as the leader of the “Western world” in opposing “communism” during the Cold War when in fact its strategy was to spread Bolshevism in its most destructive — Trotskyite — sense.[59] Ledeen refers to the exporting of revolution as one would think an old Trot die-hard would exhort, yet he claims to speak for American “conservatism,” a phenomenon that Yockey would describe as being an element of “Culture retardation,” of a bankrupt “leadership” stratum, in a nominal sense, that becomes the hireling of the culture-distorter. American neo-conservatism, it should be noted, is itself being a metamorphosis of Trotskyism that had undergone an alchemical change in the distillery of Cold War anti-Stalinism.[60]
Ledeen refers hence in Bolshevik terms to exporting a “democratic revolution” and gives credit to the American regime for having toppled both the Soviet bloc and White rule in South Africa, regimes that in their own way were anachronisms in the “new world order” and therefore had to be removed, as in the case of the Islamic states today, in the interests of what crypto-Mason George H. W. Bush overtly termed the “new world order” in direct reference to the first war against Iraq. Note Ledeen mentions America’s “historic mission” and American’s “revolutionary burden,” again messianic expressions reflecting the same mentality as Marx and Trotsky, and as if to confirm the nature of this mission Ledeen pointedly uses the term “chutzpah” to describe the outlook of the American neo-messianists.
It is time once again to export the democratic revolution. To those who say it cannot be done, we need only point to the 1980s, when we led a global democratic revolution that toppled tyrants from Moscow to Johannesburg. Then, too, the smart folks said it could not be done, and they laughed at Ronald Reagan’s chutzpah when he said that the Soviet tyrants were done for, and called on the West to think hard about the post-Communist era. We destroyed the Soviet Empire, and then walked away from our great triumph in the Third World War of the Twentieth Century. As I sadly wrote at that time, when America abandons its historic mission, our enemies take heart, grow stronger, and eventually begin to kill us again. And so they have, forcing us to take up our revolutionary burden, and bring down the despotic regimes that have made possible the hateful events of the 11th of September.”[61]
American palaeo-conservative, Jospeh Sobran, remarked in 2001 of this world situation that:
Anti-Americanism is no longer a mere fad of Marxist university students; it’s a profound reaction of traditional societies against a corrupt and corrupting modernization that is being imposed on them, by both violence and seduction. Confronted with today’s America, then, the Christian Arab finds himself in unexpected sympathy with his Muslim enemy.”[62] (Emphasis added).
The “Bolshevism of Washington” can today just as easily be called “neo-conservatism.” While this might seem a paradox, even an absurdity, the nature of this can be readily understood by those who have the higher perspective provided by Yockeyan cultural morphology, which refers to the spirit or inner imperative of doctrines, rather than superficialities. “Bolshevism” in such a context might be used to describe anything of an organically destructive nature involving manipulation of the masses. Hence Yockey saw the “democratic” principles of America as fundamentally communistic, both being forms of materialism arising from the same 19th-century Zeitgeist:
The leading values of communism are identical with those of liberal democracy… The sole difference between liberal-democracy and communism in practice was that communism was an intensification of those beliefs where they became political… [63]
The American apologists for global hegemony who now call the same principles that were inaugurated by the “1933 Revolution,”[64] “neo-conservatism,” often indeed come from a Bolshevik or a Menshevik background, as distinct from — indeed antithetical — to what the American philosopher Paul Gottfried has coined “palaeoconservatism.” The “neo-conservative” movement had major input from Trotskyism, often via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and has remained basically neo-Trotskyite. I have attempted to trace this back from the Trotsky-Stalin split or what Yockey early perceived as a dichotomy of Slavic Bolshevism versus Jewish Bolshevism, through to factions within the American Left led by CIA operative Sidney Hook, and in particular by the Trotskyite factionalist Max Shachtman, these tendencies within the American Left becoming so obsessed with opposing Stalinism that they ended up providing the basis for Cold War ideology and operations, which have been transformed into other methods for the post-Soviet era, continuing to spread what is called the “global democratic revolution.”[65] Indeed not only did Hook and Shachtman end up supporting Cold War US strategy, so did Trotsky’s widow Natalia Sedova, who broke with the Fourth International and commended the USA for its actions in Korea, while positing, like Shachtman, the USSR as being the primary obstacle to world socialism.[66]
From this background emerged the previously mentioned National Endowment for Democracy, taking the place of the redundant Congress for Cultural Freedom in the aftermath of the Cold War, to continue the “Bolshevism of Washington” in new directions. This was founded in 1983 by Shachtmanite Tom Kahn of the AFL-CIO, who had developed a network of contacts with social democrats throughout the Soviet bloc, Africa, and Latin America. Another Shachtmanite, Carl Gershman, became the first president in 1984, and was a founder of the Social Democrats USA. The NED was introduced to Congress by George Agree, and thus gets Congressional funding for its world revolutionary operations.[67]
When Yockey published Imperium in 1948 he viewed Russia as alien to and incompatible with the Western cultural organism and thus as an “outer enemy,”[68] a view that persisted in his final essay, “The World in Flames: An Estimate of the World Situation,” written in 1960, the year of his death. Yockey continued to advocate a neutralist position for Europe in the event of a US-Russian conflict, although had long considered Russian occupation of Europe to be less damaging to the cultural organism than the US occupation, and saw the possibility of Westernising a Russian occupier. He saw the increase in neutralist states as one of the few positive development in the world situation, and in particular the rise of Arab Nationalism, at that time epitomized by “a great and vigorous man,” Nasser.[69] He saw a resurgent Islam as providing a bloc that diminished World Zionism without augmenting “Russian-Chinese power.” Here Yockey was significantly in error in seeing China-Russia as a bloc. There was no Sino-Soviet bloc during Yockey’s time, and there is not one now, despite a temporary pragmatic alliance. The US and China will more likely form a bloc to contain Russia, just as they did during the 1970s. Such a conclusion is within the scope of cultural morphology, although the Russo-Chinese conflict only became apparent shortly after Yockey’s death.[70]
However, as with the emergence of Islam, Yockey also saw that a Latin American bloc would likewise pose a nuisance to plutocracy, and he used the example of Cuba at that time. In recent years Chavez’s Venezuela has actively encouraged the formation of a Bolivarian bloc across Latin America, while repudiating both the USA and Zionism, and significantly has the support of Russia in doing so.[71]
Russia is pregnant with possibilities, and retains the only semblance of a “barbarian horde” with the cleansing power to sweep away the filth of decay that pervades the “West” in its cycle of decline. Russia continues to show itself impervious to “democracy” despite the hapless efforts of the “culture retarders” Gorbechev and Yeltsin. The Russian is eternally a “peasant” as Yockey stated, immune from the decadence of the megalopolis. The way the Russian regime deals with oligarchs is a sign of cultural health. While an organic Russo-Western Civilization may or may not be possible, such a conception is not unheard of, De Gaulle proposing a “united Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals”[72] while another French geopolitical thinker, Olivier Vedrine, considers in contrast to Yockey, Russia to be “European,” calling for a united front.[73] The world situation as it now stands has changed since Yockey’s time, but Yockey’s analytical method remains legitimate, even if it leads to conclusions regarding Russia, China, and the US that differ from Yockey’s own. But, as his reaction to the 1952 Prague Treason Trial shows, Yockey was above all a realist who was able to radically revise his thinking based on changing circumstances.
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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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[25] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969).
[26] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (Britain: Harper and Row, 1958), 26–27.
[27] Brave New World Revisited, 27.
[28] Brave New World Revisited, ch. 8, “Chemical Persuasion.”
[29] Brave New World Revisited.
[30] Brave New World, ch. 5.
[31] Yockey, “Social Degeneration,” Proclamation of London, 14.
[32] Proclamation of London
[33] Proclamation of London, 14–15.
[34] Hook and Dewey had in 1937 established a so-called commission of inquiry to investigate the Moscow Trials against Trotskyites, for the purpose of white-washing Trotsky under the guise of a neutral judicial inquiry. However, one of the commissioners, Carleton Beals, one of the party that went with Dewey, et al. to Mexico to question Trotsky, resigned in disgust, labeling the inquiry “Trotsky’s pink tea party.” C. Beals, “The Fewer Outsiders the Better: The Pink Tea Party Trials,” Saturday Evening Post, June 12, 1937.
[35] On Steinem and the CIA manipulation of the National Students’ Association see Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), 36–39. Gloria Steinem the seminal feminist was an Establishment creation.
[36] Leary was the perfect CIA/Establishment lackey, a mouthpiece for the System-invented psychedelic generation. Journalist Mark Riebling posed the question: “Was the Sixties rebellion a Government Plot?” in Mark Riebling, “Tinker, Tailor, Stoner, Spy: Was Timothy Leary a CIA Agent? Was JFK the ‘Manchurian Candidate’? Was the Sixties Revolution Really a Government Plot?”
[37] Central Intelligence Agency, “Cultural Cold War: Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949–50.
[38] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999).
[39] The Soros networks support the legalization of narcotics and the promotion of feminism, including liberalized abortion, in states that maintain a vestige of tradition and therefore pose a stumbling block to globalization. The former Soviet bloc is a particular target for Soros subversion. One such Soros front is the Drug Policy Alliance Network, which includes Establishment luminaries such as George Schultz, Paul Volcker, Vaclav Havel, and Soros himself. Drug Policy Alliance Network, About DPA Network.
[40] The National Endowment for Democracy was the brainchild of Trotskyite Tom Kahn. See below.
[41] Yockey, “The American Revolution of 1933,” Imperium, 492–501.
[42] See the wailing about this in Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed.
[43] K. R. Bolton, “The Art of ‘Rootless Cosmopolitanism’: America’s Offensive Against Civilisation,” in The Radical Tradition: Philosophy, Metapolitics & Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Troy Southgate (New Zealand: Primordial Traditions, forthcoming).
[44] The Cultural Cold War, 256.
[45] “Motherwell was a member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom,” the US branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as was Jackson Pollock (The Cultural Cold War, 276). Both Partisan Review editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips became members of the American committee of the CCF (The Cultural Cold War, 158).
[46] Clement Greenberg,. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (1939): 34–49. The essay can be read here.
[47] Bolton, “The Art of ‘Rootless Cosmopolitanism.’”
[48] Clement Greenberg, “American Type Painting,” Partisan Review, Spring 1955.
[49] John O’Brien, “Introduction,” The Collected Essays and Criticism of Clement Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), vol. 3, xxvii.
[50] The Collected Essays and Criticism of Clement Greenberg, vol. 3, xxviii.
[51] The Collected Essays and Criticism of Clement Greenberg, vol. 3, xxviii.
[52] The Cultural Cold War, 263.
[53] The Cultural Cold War, 263.
[54] The Cultural Cold War, 262. Luce’s Life magazine featured Jackson Pollock in its August 1949 issue, making Pollock a household name (The Cultural Cold War, 267).
[55] The Cultural Cold War, 263.
[56] The Cultural Cold War, 267.
[57] Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern Art: An Intimidate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), cited by Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 267.
[58] Ralph Peters, “Constant Conflict,” Parameters, Summer 1997, 4–14.
[59] K. R. Bolton, “America’s ‘World Revolution:’ Neo-Trotskyite Foundations of US Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy Journal, May 3, 2010.
[60] K. R. Bolton, “America’s ‘World Revolution.’”
[61] Michael Ledeen, “Creative Destruction: How to Wage a Revolutionary War,” National Review online, September 20, 2001.
[62] Joe Sobran, conservative Catholic columnist, “Why?,” SOBRAN’S — The Real News of the Month, vol. 8, no. 11 (November 2001).
[63] Yockey, “Proclamation of London,” 13.
[64] Couldn’t it be considered that it was with Woodrow Wilson that the “American Revolution” was inaugurated?
[65] As President Bush referred to it in 1983 before a conference of the NED, when stating that just as the Soviet bloc had been “liberated” under Reagan, he would inaugurate the “liberation” of the Muslim world. Fred Barbash, “Bush: Iraq Part of ‘Global Democratic Revolution’: Liberation of Middle East Portrayed as Continuation of Reagan’s Policies,” Washington Post, November 6, 2003.
[66] Natalia Sedova Trotsky, May 9, 1951, Mexico City, letter to the leadership of the Fourth International and the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, Labor Action of June 17, 1951.
[67] Bolton, “America’s ‘World Revolution.’”
[68] Imperium, 586.
[69] Yockey, “The World in Flames: An Estimate of the World Situation,” VI.
[70] Bolton, “Russian and China: An Approaching Conflict.”
[71] Bolton, “An ANZAC-Indo-Russian Alliance? Geopolitical Alternatives for Australia and New Zealand,” India Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 2 (August 2010), 188.
[72] Yockey regarded De Gaulle as a “cretin” yet saw him as embodying the European desire for neutrality, and stated that “an idiot might save Europe,” having “accidentally alighted” upon this “spiritual force.” Yockey, “The World In Flames,” VI.
[73] Olivier Vedrine, “Russia is indeed a European country,” September 2009. Cited by Bolton, India Quarterly, 188–89.
