Lis­ten: Side 1 | Side 2

In this inter­view, author Kevin Coogan dis­cuss­es key ele­ments of his land­mark text Dream­er of the Day: Fran­cis Park­er Yock­ey and the Post­war Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al (Autono­me­dia, copy­right 1999.) Famil­iar to vet­er­an lis­ten­ers as author of the sem­i­nal arti­cle about the SMOM enti­tled “The Men Behind the New Counter-Ref­or­ma­tion,” and as the co-author of sev­er­al fine arti­cles with Mar­tin A. Lee, Coogan has writ­ten an exhaus­tive account of the influ­en­tial, but lit­tle known fas­cist the­o­reti­cian for whom his book is titled. Beyond that, he has used Yock­ey’s fas­ci­nat­ing (and elu­sive) life as a vehi­cle for illus­trat­ing the struc­ture and ide­ol­o­gy of post-war inter­na­tion­al fas­cism.

After dis­cussing Yock­ey’s influ­ence on the Lib­er­ty Lob­by’s Willis Car­to, Coogan encap­su­lates the influ­ence of Ger­man authors Oswald Spen­gler and Carl Schmitt on the devel­op­ment of Yock­ey’s thought. The Ger­man Con­ser­v­a­tive Rev­o­lu­tion and the geopol­i­tics of the­o­reti­cian Karl Haushofer also exert­ed pro­found influ­ence on the devel­op­ment of Yock­ey’s out­look.

Raised in Chica­go, Yock­ey net­worked with Windy City fas­cist activist New­ton Jenk­ins and peo­ple asso­ci­at­ed with the Ger­man-Amer­i­can Bund (a Ger­man Amer­i­can pro-Nazi group) and Father Cough­lin (a pop­u­lar radio fas­cist.) Yock­ey may also have been con­nect­ed to the appa­ra­tus of a Nazi sab­o­tage oper­a­tion (code-named Pas­to­rius) through his asso­ci­a­tion with a Nazi activist named Her­bert Haupt. Coogan details Yock­ey ’ s asso­ci­a­tion with anoth­er Third Reich agent named Harold Kei­th Thomp­son.

A prob­a­ble agent for the SD (the intel­li­gence ser­vice of the SS), Thomp­son was a skilled forg­er, who served as the PR agent for Mar­guerite Oswald (Lee’s moth­er). The first half of the inter­view con­cludes with exam­i­na­tion of Coogan’s hypo­thet­i­cal con­struct called The Order. This orga­ni­za­tion con­sti­tutes an under­ground, post-war SS-asso­ci­at­ed group, func­tion­ing as a sort of direc­torate and intel­li­gence ser­vice for an “under­ground Reich”. In the sec­ond half of the inter­view, Coogan sets forth some of Yock­ey’s post-war con­nec­tions, illus­tra­tive of the net­works of which he was a part. For­mer Goebbels Pro­pa­gan­da Min­istry offi­cial Johann Von Leers pub­lished a Nazi peri­od­i­cal enti­tled Der Weg, which laud­ed Yock­ey. Yock­ey also worked with the orga­ni­za­tion of Wern­er Nau­mann, anoth­er Goebbels sub­or­di­nate, who was very active in the post-war Nazi milieu in Ger­many.

After describ­ing Nau­man­n’s net­work, Coogan describes the occult views of fas­cist philoso­pher Julius Evola, anoth­er influ­ence upon and admir­er of Yock­ey. (Coogan the­o­rizes that Evola’s work with the SD may have been instru­men­tal in giv­ing birth to the hypo­thet­i­cal “Order.”) Both Yock­ey and Evola envi­sioned a type of “spir­i­tu­al fas­cism,” as opposed to the “blood” or Volkisch ide­ol­o­gy of “racial fas­cists”. Like Evola, Yock­ey also embraced cer­tain aspects of occultism as part of his fas­cist phi­los­o­phy. Abbre­vi­at­ed in this descrip­tion, the ele­ments of Coogan’s analy­sis are intri­cate and detailed, as is his book. Mr. Emory emphat­i­cal­ly endors­es this vol­ume. (Record­ed on 12/5/99.)