Imperium excerpts, chapter V

A book dedicated “To the hero of the Second World War”

The 20th Century Historical Outlook

The Demise of the Linear View of History

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Life is a continuous battle between Young and Old, Old and New, Innovation and Tradition. Ask Galileo, Bruno, Servetus, Copernicus, Gauss. All of them represented the Future, yet all were overcome, in one way or another, during their own lives, by the enthroned Past. Copernicus was afraid to publish during his lifetime, lest he be burned as heretic. Gauss only revealed his liberating discovery of non-Euclidean geometries after his death, for fear of the clamor of the Boeotians. It is therefore not surprising when the materialists persecute, by maligning, by conspiracy of silence, cutting off from access to publicity, or by driving to suicide, as in the case of Haushofer, those who think in 20th century terms and specifically reject the methods and conclusions of 19th century materialism.

Even in the Italian Renaissance, Francesco Pico wrote against the mania for the Classical: “Who will be afraid to confront Plato with Augustine, or Aristotle with Thomas, Albert, and Scotus?” Savonarola’s movement also had cultural, as well as religious, significance: into the bonfires went the Classical works. The whole Classicist tendency of the Italian Renaissance has been too heavily drawn: it was literary, academic, the possession of a few small circles, and those not the leading ones in thought or action.

And yet this movement has been put forward as the “link” between two Cultures that have nothing in common in order to create a picture of History as a straight line instead of as the spiritually parallel, pure, independent, development of High Cultures.

Imperium excerpts, chapter 4

A book dedicated “To the hero of the Second World War”

The 20th Century Historical Outlook

The Meaning of Facts

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Some men have a greater inner need to think abstractly than others.

For one of the characteristics of Life-facts is that distance–particularly temporal distance–shows up their lineaments more clearly. We know more of Imperial history than Tacitus knew, more of Napoleonic history than Napoleon knew, vastly more of the First World War than its creators and participants knew, and Western men in 2050 will know our times in a way that we can never know them.

Imperium excerpts, chapter 3

A book dedicated “To the hero of the Second World War”

The 20th Century Historical Outlook

The Relativity of History

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Just as the Western Culture has the most intensely historic soul, so does it develop men with the greatest historical sense. It is a Culture which has always been conscious of its own history.

The fact that the Culture was continually changing meant that History was continually changing. History is the continuous reinterpretation of the Past. Truth in the religio-philosophical-mathematical sense, meaning timelessly, eternally valid, dissociated from the conditions of Life, does not pertain to History. History that is true is History that is effective in the minds of significant men.

The determining thing in our outlook on History is the Spirit of our Age. Ours is an external, factual, skeptical, historical, Age. It is not moved by great religious or critical feelings. Ours is the first age in Western history in which an absolute submission to facts has triumphed over all other spiritual attitudes. Previous ages in Western history formed their History to fit their souls; we do the same, but our view has no precedent ethical or critical equipment in it. On the contrary—our ethical imperative is derived from our historical outlook and not vice versa.

Imperium excerpts, chapter 2

A book dedicated “To the hero of the Second World War”

The 20th Century Historical Outlook

The Two Aspects of History

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Men are thus differentiated also with regard to their capacity for understanding History. There is an historical sense, which can see behind the surface of history to the soul that is the determinant of this history. History, seen through the historical sense of a human being, has thus a subjective aspect. This is the first aspect of History.

The other, the objective, aspect of History, is equally incapable of rigid establishment, even though at first glance it might seem to be. The writing of purely objective history is the aim of the so-called reference, or narrative, method of presenting history. Nevertheless, it inevitably selects and orders the facts, and in this process the poetic intuition, historical sense, and flair of the author come into play. If these are totally excluded, the product is not history-writing, but a book of dates, and this, again, cannot be free from selection.

Nor is it history. Nor is impartiality possible. It is the historical sense which decides importance of past developments, past ideas, past great men. For centuries, Brutus and Pompey were held to be greater than Caesar. Around 1800, Vulpius was considered a greater poet than Goethe. Mengs, whom we have forgotten, was ranked in his day as one of the great painters of the world. Shakespeare, until more than a century after his death, was considered inferior as a playwright to more than one of his contemporaries. El Greco was unnoticed 75 years ago. Cicero and Cato were both held, until after the First World War, to be great men, rather than Culture-retarding weaklings. Joan of Arc was not included in Chastellain’s list, drawn up on the death of Charles VII, of all the army commanders who fought against England. Lastly, for the benefit of readers of 2050, I may say that the Hero and the Philosopher of the period 1900-1950 were both invisible to their contemporaries in the historical dimensions in which you see them.

What then, is History? History is the relationship between the Past and the Present. Because the Present is constantly changing, so is History. Each Age has its own History, which the Spirit of the Age creates to fit its own soul. With the passing of that Age, never to return, that particular History picture has passed. Seen from this standpoint, any attempt to write History “as it really happened” is historical immaturity, and the belief in objective standards of history-presentation is self-deception, for what will come forth will be the Spirit of the Age.

Imperium excerpts, chapter 1

A book dedicated “To the hero of the Second World War”

The 20th Century Historical Outlook

Perspective

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Far out in exterior darkness where no breath stirs, no light shines, and no sound is heard, one can glance toward this spinning earth-ball. In the astral regions, illumination is of the soul, hence all is dark but this certain star, and only a part of it is aglow. From such a distance, one can obtain an utterly untrammeled view of what is transpiring on this earth-ball. Drawing somewhat closer, continents are visible; closer yet, population-streams. One focal point exists whence the light goes forth in all directions. It is the crooked peninsula of Europe. On this tiny pendant of the great land-mass of the earth-ball, the greatest intensity of movement exists. One can see—for out here the soul and its emanations are visible—a concentration of ideas, energy, ambition, purpose, expansiveness, will-to-form. Hovering above Europe we can see what never before was so clearly visible—the presence of a purely spiritual organism.

The primitive cultures are the sole thing existing above the plane of economics, in that they attribute symbolic significance to natural occurrences and human conduct. But there is nothing in these movements resembling the High Cultures which transformed the entire appearance of the Egyptian and Babylonian landscapes for almost forty generations from their first beginning until the last sinking.

Physical time flows on and centuries pass in darkness. Then, precisely as in Egypt and Babylonia, but again of a different hue, and to different music, a light appears over the Punjab. It becomes bright and firm. The same wealth of forms and significant happenings work themselves out as in the earlier two organisms. Its creations are all in the highest degree individual, as different from its two predecessors as they were vis-à-vis one another, but they follow the same grand rhythms. The same multi-colored pageant of nobles and priests, temples and schools, nations and cities, arts and philosophies, armies and sciences, letters and wars, passes before the eye.

II

Before this high culture was well on its way, another had started to actualize itself in the Hwang-Ho valley in China. And then a few centuries later, about 1100 B.C in our way of reckoning, the Classical Culture begins on the shores of the Aegean. Both of these cultures have the stamp of individuality, their own way of coloring and influencing their terrestrial creations, but both are subject to the same morphology as the others observed.

As this Classical Culture draws to its close, around the time of Christ, another one appears in a landscape subjugated by the Classical in its last expansive phase—Arabia.

In its later, expansive phase, this culture embraced European Spain as the Western Caliphate. Its life span, its end form, its last great crisis—all followed the same organic regularity as the others. Some five centuries later the now familiar manifestations of another High Culture begin in the remote landscapes of Mexico and Peru. It is to have the most tragic destiny of any we have yet seen. Around 1000 A.D. the European Culture is meanwhile born, and at its very birth shows itself to be distinguished from the others by the extraordinary intensity of its self-expression, by its pushing into every distance both in the spiritual realm, and in the physical.

Within the [Western] Culture arose Gothic Christianity, the transcendent symbols of Empire and Papacy, the Gothic cathedrals, the unlocking of the secrets of the world of the soul and the world of nature in monastery cells. The Culture-soul shaped for its own expression the nations of the West.

Life slowly externalizes: political problems move into the center; new economic resources are developed to support the political contests; the old agricultural economy metamorphoses into an industrial economy. At the end of this path stands a ghostly and terrifying Idea: Money. Other Cultures also had seen this phenomenon appear at the same stage and grow to similar dimensions. Its slow growth in importance proceeds pari passe with the gradual self-assertion of Reason against Faith. It reaches its highest point with the Age of Nationalism, when the parts of the Culture tear one another to bits, even as outer dangers loom threateningly. At its highest point, Money, allied with Rationalism, contests for the supremacy over the life of the Culture with the forces of State and Tradition, Society and Religion. In our brief visit to interstellar space, we found the position of detachment whence we could see this grand life-drama unfold itself seven times in seven High Cultures, and we saw each of the seven surmount the last great crisis of two centuries’ duration.

The great crisis of the West set in forcefully with the French Revolution and its consequent phenomena. Napoleon was the symbol of the transition of Culture into Civilization—Civilization, the life of the material, the external, of power, giant economies, armies, and fleets, of great numbers and colossal technics, over Culture, the inner life of religion, philosophy, arts, domination of the external life of politics and economics by strict form and symbolism, strict restraint of the beast-of-prey in man, feeling of cultural unity. It is the victory of Rationalism, Money and the great city over the traditions of religion and authority, of Intellect over Instinct.

We had seen all this in the previous high cultures as they approached their final life-phase. In each case the crisis had been resolved by the resurgence of the old forces of Religion and Authority, their victory over Rationalism and Money, and the final union of the nations into an Imperium. The two-century-long crisis in the life of the great organism expressed itself in gigantic wars and revolutions. All the Cultural energy that had previously gone into inner creations of thought, religion, philosophy, science, art-forms, great literature, now goes into the outer life of economics, war, technics, politics. The symbolism of power succeeds to the highest place in this last phase.

III

Since a Culture is organic, it has an individuality, and a soul. Thus it cannot be influenced in its depths from any outside force whatever. It has a destiny, like all organisms. Because it has a soul, all of its manifestations will be impressed by the same spiritual stamp, just as each man’s life is the creation of his own individuality. Because it has a soul, this particular culture can never come again after it has passed. Like the nations it creates to express phases of its own life, it exists only once. There will never be another Indian culture, Aztec-Mayan Culture, Classical Culture, or Western Culture, any more than there will be a second Spartan nation, Roman nation, French or English nation. Since a Culture is organic, it has a life-span. We observed this life span: it is about thirty-five generations at highest potential, or about forty-five generations from its first stirrings in the landscape until its final subsiding.

Like each man, a Culture has ages, which succeed one another with rhythmic inevitability. They are laid down for it by its own organic law, just as the senility of a man is laid down at his conception.

Scientific thinking is at the height of its power in the realm of matter, that which possesses extension, but no direction. Material happenings can be controlled, are reversible, produce identical results under identical conditions, are recurrent, can be classified, can be successfully comprehended as though they are subject to an a priori, mechanical, necessity, in other words, to Causality. Scientific thinking is powerless in the domain of Life, for its happenings are uncontrollable, irreversible, never-recurring, unique, cannot be classified, are unamenable to rational treatment, and possessed of no external, mechanical necessity. Every organism is something never seen before, that follows an inner necessity, that passes away, never to reappear.

Fate is not synonymous with destiny, but the opposite to it. Fate attributes necessity to the incidents of a life, but Destiny is the inner necessity of the organism. An incident can wipe out a life, and thus terminate its destiny, but this event came from outside the organism, and was thus apart from its destiny. Even the most inorganic thinker or scientifico, the crassest materialist or mechanist, is subject to his own destiny, his own soul, his own character, his own life span, and outside this framework of destiny his free, unbound flight of causal fancy cannot deliver him.

Revilo Oliver on “Imperium”

Under the pseudonym of Ulick Varange, Francis Parker Yockey’s two-volume Imperium was published ten years before I was born and was dedicated “To the hero of the Second World War,” about whom some reviewers speculate was Hitler.

The following excerpts come from a subsequent edition: an introduction authored by Dr. Revilo Oliver. They resonate with Greg Johnson’s thoughts in a recent entry critical of the universalism in Christianity. No ellipsis added between unquoted paragraphs:





Yockey in 1960

Dimly, I could make out the form of this man—this strange and lonely man—through the thick wire netting. Inwardly, I cursed these heavy screens that prevented our confrontation. For even though our mutual host was the San Francisco County Jail, and even though the man upon whom I was calling was locked in equality with petty thieves and criminals, I knew that I was in the presence of a great force, and I could feel History standing aside me.

Yesterday, the headlines had exploded their sensational discovery. “MYSTERY MAN WITH THREE PASSPORTS JAILED HERE,” they screamed. A man of mystery—of wickedness—had been captured. A man given to dark deeds and—much worse—forbidden thoughts, too, the journalists squealed. A man who had roamed the earth on mysterious missions and who was found to be so dangerous that his bail was set at $50,000—a figure ten or twenty times the normal bail for passport fraud. The excitement of the newspapers and the mystery of it all seemed to indicate that this desperado was an international gangster, or a top communist agent.

At least, this is what the papers hinted. But I know now that it erred in many ways, this “free press” of ours. I know now that the only real crime of Francis Parker Yockey was to write a book, and for this he had to die.

Yockey was a concert-level pianist; he was a gifted writer. He studied languages and became a linguist. As a lawyer, he never lost a case. He had an extraordinary grasp of the world of finance—and this is surprising, for we learn that in his philosophy economics is relegated to a relatively unimportant position. And it is as the Philosopher that Yockey reached the summit; it is this for which he will be remembered; he was a man of incredible vision. Even so, his personality was spiced by the precious gift of a sense of humor.

Like the great majority of Americans, Yockey opposed American intervention in the Second World War. Nevertheless, he joined the army and served until 1942 when he received a medical discharge (honorable). The next few years were spent in the practice of law, first in Illinois and subsequently in Detroit, where he was appointed Assistant County Attorney for Wayne County, Michigan.

In 1946, Yockey was offered a job with the war crimes tribunal and went to Europe. He was assigned to Wiesbaden, where the “second string” Nazis were lined up for trial and punishment. The Europe of 1946 was a war-ravaged continent, not the prosperous land we know today. Viewing the carnage, and seeing with his own eyes the visible effects of the unspeakable Morgenthau Plan which had as its purpose the starvation of 30 million Germans, and which was being put into effect at that time, he no doubt found ample reinforcement for his conviction that American involvement in the war had been a ghastly mistake.

It was late 1947 when Yockey returned to Europe. He sought out a quiet inn at Brittas Bay, Ireland. Isolated, he struggled to begin. Finally, he started to write, and in six months—working entirely without notes—Francis Parker Yockey completed Imperium.

The formidable task of publishing it was the next step. Here, also, Yockey ran into serious problems, for no publisher would touch the book, it being too “controversial.”  Hungry publishers of our advanced day know that any pile of trash, filth, sex, sadism, perversion and sickness will sell when wrapped between two gaudy covers and called a book, but under no circumstances may they allow readers to come into contact with a serious work unless it contains the standard obeisances to the catchwords of equality, democracy and universal brotherhood.

Finally, however, Yockey was able to secure the necessary financing, and production began.

The first edition of Imperium was issued in two volumes. Volume I has 405 pages and three chapters. Volume II has 280 pages and also three chapters. Both were published in 1948 in the name of Westropa Press. Volume I was printed by C. A. Brooks & Co., Ltd. and Volume II by Jones & Dale—both of London. Both volumes measure 5 x 7 1/4 inches in dimensions and have a red dust jacket with the title in black script on a white held. The cover of Volume I is tan and that of Volume II is black.

It is known that 1,000 copies of Volume I, but only 200 copies of Volume II, were finished. The discrepancy in quantity and the change in printers point to the difficulty in financing the job. Copies of the first edition are, of course, virtually unobtainable today.

*   *   *

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.

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.”

*   *   *

There is much in Imperium which can be easily misinterpreted. There is something for everyone to agree with. And there is something for everyone to disagree with. This is a distinguishing characteristic of every truly vital and revolutionary departure.

It is important to seek the origins of Yockey’s philosophy. [Oswald] Spengler published Decline in July, 1918, and we are still being washed in the very first breakwaters of that titanic event. For The Decline of the West was fully as revolutionary to the study of history in 1918 as Copernicus’ theory of heliocentricity was to the study of astronomy in 1543.

What, we may ask, is the main cause of resistance to accepting Spengler aside from the fact that he is a massive roadblock to the total victory of the marxist-liberal “intellectual”? The main difficulties, I think, are two: the necessity of acknowledging the essentially alien nature of every cultural soul, and the apparent necessity to reconcile ourselves to the dismal fact that our own Western organism must, too, die as have all those [civilizations] which have passed before.

As for the first specific difficulty, the acknowledgment of the essentially alien nature of each cultural soul, it follows that if every culture has its own inner vitality, it will be uninfluenced by the spirit of any other. This also runs against the very deepest grain of Western man who, for five hundred years and more, has been proselyting men all over the world in the vain hope of making them over into his own beloved image.

This psychological block runs deep in the West—so deep that it is an error which is apparent in all philosophical strata, certainly not only the leftist variety. Name any philosopher, economist or religious adept of Western history, except Hegel (yes, even including Spengler) and you are virtually certain to find a man who sought to lay universal laws of human behavior; who, in other words, saw no essential difference between races. This error is so fundamental it is usually unconscious.

The Roman Catholic Church is a case in point. Tradition-minded Westerners rightly speak of the Church as being a bulwark of the West, but sometimes go so far as to identify the Church as the West. Unfortunately, the compliment is not returned. The Holy Roman Church is a universal Church—one Church for all men—which sees all people, wherever they are and whoever they be, as equal human souls whose bodies are to be brought to the holy embrace of Vatican City. It is the first to reject the impious suggestion that it owes a primary loyalty to the West. Scientific and philosophical demonstrations that men and cultures are, nevertheless, different in many fundamental respects and that it is unhealthy—unethical—to mix them are sure to meet with the same inhospitable reception that the Church earlier gave to Copernicus and Galileo. In April of 1962 three Catholics in New Orleans were excommunicated for daring to stand on this heretical Verity.

The zeitgeist is always reflected in definitions, so it is the height of insult for a White man today to be labeled an “isolationist” or “nationalist.” White folks must all be “free traders,” “internationalists” and “cosmopolitan” in our outlook, and how we admire the “citizen of the world,” whatever that is.

Our view is intently focused away from our marches; it is far easier, we have discovered, to solve the problems of total strangers than to solve our own. Non-Western peoples are not so enlightened as we, and it is eagerly excused, utilizing a newly-discovered Christian double standard which is a mark of modern moral superiority, like belonging to the Classics Book Club or contributing to the Negro College Fund. What, asks Nietzsche, has caused more suffering than the follies of the compassionate? It is good for colored peoples to be nationalistic; we encourage it, in fact, and snap up Israel Bonds with a warm feeling of self-righteousness. We are joyful when colored peoples and Jews exhibit “race pride,” the cardinal sin and taboo of our own puritanical environment. Incidentally, why is it that every subject except one can be discussed in our enlightened age? Atheism is now a dull subject. Marxism is even duller, after one hundred years of popularity. A step further has taken us past plain sex to sadism and perversion; the Marquis de Sade is even becoming jaded. What racy topic is left to discuss since the equalists have brought democracy’s blessings? Only one thing cannot be discussed in polite company: race.

If we are to draw analogies between cultures and organisms we must agree that the soul of the organism dies only because of the death of the body. The soul can sicken—the soul of the West is now diseased and perhaps mortally ill—but it cannot die unless the organism itself dies. And this, point out the racists, is precisely what has happened to all previous cultures; death of the organism being the natural result of the suicidal process of imperialism.

A word on the racial view of history before proceeding further. Today, of course, history is written from the Marxist standpoint of economics, linear progress and class warfare—and Yockey explains this triple error well. Previous to the first World War history was written largely from the racial point of view. History was seen as the dramatic story of the movements, struggles and developments of races, which it is. Suppression of the racist point of view reached its apex about 1960.

Perhaps the biggest reason for a growing tendency of White folks to look at the races objectively is, paradoxically, precisely because they have been forced to look at them subjectively! It is no problem to maintain a myth in ignorance. Negro equality, for example, is easier to believe in if there are no Negroes around to destroy the concept. In a word, internationalism in practice quickly metamorphoses into racism. To turn from experience to academic matters, how many Americans or Britons are acquainted with the stupendously elemental fact that they are—in the historical sense—Germans; that they are, like it or not, a part of that great Teutonic-Celtic family which—millenniums before the dawn of Rome or even Greece—was one tribe, with one language?

Further, there is a correlation too perfect to be a coincidence in that in every case on record of the death or stagnation of a Culture there has been simultaneously an abortive attempt to digest large numbers of cultural and racial aliens into the organism. In the case of Rome and Greece death came about through imperialism and the resulting, inevitable backwash of conquered peoples and races into the heartland as slaves, bringing exotic religions, different philosophies; in a word, cultural sophistication first, then cultural anarchy. In the case of Persia, India and the Amerindian civilizations, a race of conquerors superimposed their civilization upon a mass of indigenous people; the area flourished for awhile, then the Culture vanished or, in the case of America, was on the verge of vanishing, as the descendants of the conquerors became soft, fat and liberal and took on more and more of the accoutrements and blood of the subject population. In the case of Egypt, the alien blood was brought in over the course of many centuries by the importation of Negro slaves. The inevitable racial mongrelization followed, creating the Egypt we know today.

We thus see the real reason underlying the “inevitable” decline and destruction of a cultural organism. It is because, at a certain stage, a Culture develops a bad case of universalism. Speaking pathologically, unless this is sublimated to harmless channels by proper treatment, it will inevitably kill the organism through the absorption of a resulting flood of alien microbes. It is, therefore, the natural by-product of universalism which kills the organism; the death of the organism itself is neither natural nor necessary!

This conclusion comes by a synthesis of the Spenglerian and the racial point of view. Each tempers the other; together a comprehensive and hopeful theory of history can be developed which holds a deep meaning to Westerners of this day. At all costs, the imperialistic phase of our development must be avoided, and we must guard against the digestion of alien matter we have already partially absorbed.

What is the significance of Imperium? In one respect, Imperium is akin to Das Kapital, for Karl Marx gave to the conspiratorial Culture Distorter the necessary ideological mask to hide its mission of ruthless, total destruction. He provided an ugly and invalid theory of man, cloaked in putrifying equality, mewling hypocrisy, the disease of undiscriminating altruism and the “science” of economics.

Francis Parker Yockey has done the same thing for those who are constructive-minded and who have the intellectual and moral courage to face reality and seek and speak truth. This is why, although Yockey’s plan for the West may not be perfect, it contains atomic power. If only one man reading this book is influenced to lead, and if others are made to see the world a little more clearly than they do now, then Yockey’s life of suffering and persecution and his monumental accomplishment in spite of all has not been in vain.

—Revilo P. Oliver