Recorded May 20, 2007
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REALAUDIO

Revis­it­ing Kevin Coogan, author of Dreamer of the Day: Fran­cis Parker Yockey and the Post­war Fas­cist Inter­na­tional, this pro­gram sets forth some of the fun­da­men­tals of Kevin’s weighty and for­mi­da­ble book. Although not well known, even after his death, Fran­cis Parker Yockey exerted a pro­found ide­o­log­i­cal influ­ence on the course of post­war fas­cism. A Nazi agent before, dur­ing and after World War II, Yockey is best known for his sig­na­ture piece Imperium. Advo­cat­ing a globally-dominant, Pan-European fas­cism, Yockey’s book pre­scribes this state of affairs as the solu­tion to Oswald Spengler’s the­sis of The Decline of the West, which fore­saw the dis­in­te­gra­tion of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. See­ing the United States as the great­est threat to civ­i­lized soci­ety, Yockey advo­cated that fas­cists of “the Imperium” ally with some strange bed­fel­lows in order to reverse the course of his­tory. Yockey believed it nec­es­sary for fas­cists to work with polit­i­cal and eth­nic ele­ments usu­ally seen as anti­thet­i­cal to fas­cism, such as the for­mer USSR, the People’s Repub­lic of China, Castro’s Cuba, Third World coun­tries and African-American sep­a­ratists. Much of the pro­gram high­lights var­i­ous indi­vid­u­als and move­ments within the post­war fas­cist inter­na­tional that man­i­fest ele­ments of Yockey’s philosophy.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Dis­cus­sion of the Third Posi­tion, a form of fas­cism with much in com­mon with some of the tenets of Imperium; Dis­cus­sion of Fran­cois Genoud [a key Nazi oper­a­tive who paved the way for forg­ing alliances between Arab nation­al­ist and Islamist move­ments and Nazism]; analy­sis of the National Renais­sance Party—an Amer­i­can fas­cist party that forged liaisons with black sep­a­ratists; Yockey’s enthu­si­asm for Stalin’s anti-Semitic poli­cies. Be sure to lis­ten to the other inter­views with Mr.Coogan about “Dreamer of the Day,” avail­able on the WFMU website.

1. Pre­sent­ing an overview of his book Dreamer of the Day: Fran­cis Parker Yockey and the Post­war Fas­cist Inter­na­tional, this inter­view with Kevin Coogan will [hope­fully] spur enter­pris­ing lis­ten­ers to read this vitally impor­tant and remark­able vol­ume. Cited by Mr. Emory as one of the most impor­tant books ever writ­ten about fas­cism, “Dreamer . . .” illu­mi­nates the land­scape of con­tem­po­rary inter­na­tional fas­cism, reveal­ing polit­i­cal alliances that will sur­prise those with a more lim­ited, con­ven­tional view of fas­cism. To learn more about this piv­otal doc­u­ment, check out Mr. Emory’s numer­ous inter­views with, and pro­grams about, Mr. Coogan’s work.

2. A Chicago native, Yockey hated Amer­ica, Amer­i­can cul­ture and Jews, and saw a Europe united under fascism—an “Imperium”–as the only alter­na­tive to the “Decline of the West” [the title of the mag­num opus of Oswald Spen­gler, a major influ­ence on Yockey.] Hav­ing spied for Nazi Ger­many and par­tic­i­pated in the Axis Fifth Col­umn move­ment in this coun­try, Yockey was shaken by the defeat of the Third Reich. Con­tin­u­ing his efforts on behalf of fas­cism, Yockey devoted the post­war years to work­ing with what Mr. Coogan calls a “post­war fas­cist inter­na­tional.” Even­tu­ally, Yockey was arrested in the United States and com­mit­ted sui­cide by swal­low­ing a cyanide cap­sule in prison.

3. In the after­math of World War II, Yockey crafted his sig­na­ture doc­u­ment, a for­mi­da­ble tome titled Imperium, which he pub­lished under the pseu­do­nym “Ullick Varange.” Hat­ing Amer­ica and despair­ing of any­thing use­ful com­ing out of the U.S., Yockey felt that renascent Euro­pean fas­cists should make com­mon cause with ele­ments in the Third World, the for­mer USSR, the People’s Repub­lic of China and Cuba in order to defeat the United States and “Inter­na­tional Jewry.” The var­i­ous pub­lish­ing out­lets of the fas­cist Lib­erty Lobby have pub­lished Imperium.

4. A key point of dis­cus­sion con­cerns the Ban­dung con­fer­ence in Indone­sia in 1955. Con­vened with an eye to chart­ing a course for for­mer colo­nial ter­ri­to­ries that had achieved their inde­pen­dence, the con­fer­ence for­mal­ized the con­cept of ‘non-aligned” nations, chart­ing an inde­pen­dent for­eign pol­icy between the U.S. and the for­mer U.S.S.R. Yockey saw Europe in the post World War II period as being, in essence, a colo­nial ter­ri­tory occu­pied by both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In this con­test, he felt that ally­ing with the Third World offered the pos­si­bil­ity of a Euro­pean rebirth.

5. One of the pri­mary ele­ments of Yockey’s ide­ol­ogy was that the United States was the great­est evil on earth and that the Sovi­ets (par­tic­u­larly under Stalin) were prefer­able to the Yanks. Dri­ven by his vir­u­lent anti-Semitism, Yockey’s world view saw Stalin’s Prague tri­als of Jews in the early ‘50’s as an indi­ca­tion that the Sovi­ets offered a viable ally for the fas­cists of the “Imperium.” Mr. Coogan points out that Yockey’s views were influ­enced by tra­di­tional Ger­man “Ost­poli­tik” and geo-politics, which saw Rus­sia as a nec­es­sary ally of an expan­sion­ist Ger­many, pro­vid­ing the Father­land with valu­able raw materials.

6. Yockey was also sig­nif­i­cantly influ­enced by ele­ments within the Waf­fen SS who rejected the tra­di­tional “Aryan Supremacy” of Himm­ler in favor of a more prag­matic pan-Europeanism. Bet­ter suited to Germany’s pro­jected role as mas­ter of occu­pied Europe, this pan-Europeanism was adopted by Yockey as a key ele­ment of his con­cept of the “Imperium.”

7. Yockey’s ideas were real­ized, to a cer­tain extent, by the remark­able career of Fran­cois Genoud. Genoud was one of the most impor­tant activists in the post­war fas­cist inter­na­tional, exe­cut­ing oper­a­tions on behalf of the Third Reich and its residua that echo to the present. [Genoud died in 1996, but his name crops up in a num­ber of con­texts in con­nec­tion with the events of 9/11.] Most of Kevin Coogan’s appen­dix on Genoud is repro­duced in FTR#453. Genoud was par­tic­u­larly active in form­ing polit­i­cal alliances between Nazism and the Arab and Mus­lim worlds.

8. The dis­cus­sion high­lights the tac­tic pur­sued by some fas­cist groups of ally­ing with African-American sep­a­ratists in order to bring down the exist­ing social order. In par­tic­u­lar, Kevin dis­cusses the National Renais­sance Party, headed up by James Madole and advised by Fred Weiss. [The later was a German-American who worked as part of the Nazi Fifth Col­umn in Amer­i­can before, dur­ing and after the Sec­ond World War. Weiss was very close to Yockey.]

9. A polit­i­cal milieu with much in com­mon with Yockey’s phi­los­o­phy is the fas­cist Third Posi­tion. Incor­po­rat­ing ele­ments of the far left and the far right into a [func­tion­ally] uni­fied polit­i­cal front, the Third Posi­tion rejected the notion of ally­ing either with Marx­ist social­ism or free mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism. In addi­tion, the Third Posi­tion also advo­cates ide­o­log­i­cal alliance with Third World peo­ples, such as the Iran of the Aya­tol­lahs and black sep­a­ratists such as the Nation of Islam. For more about the Third Posi­tion, see Mis­cel­la­neous Archive shows M19 and M21, avail­able from Spit­fire, as well as the many for the record shows on the sub­ject. To locate the for the record shows on the third posi­tion, use the Search Func­tion at the top of the Spit­fire page.

10. Two video pro­duc­tions are being gen­er­ated by a cou­ple of doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ers. One is a DVD of a three-lecture series called “The First Refuge of a Scoundrel: The Rela­tion­ship Between Fas­cism and Reli­gion.” To learn more about this, visit The Anti-Fascist YouTube.com page. In addi­tion, there will soon be a doc­u­men­tary about Mr. Emory, titled “The Anti-Fascist.” For more about this project, visit theantifascist.com.