Lis­ten: One Seg­ment

High­light­ing aspects of con­ti­nu­ity between fas­cism past and present, this broad­cast reviews the career of the piv­otal­ly impor­tant (but lit­tle-known) Fran­cis Park­er Yock­ey. To do so, we vis­it with Kevin Coogan, author of the sem­i­nal Dream­er of the Day: Fran­cis Park­er Yock­ey and the Post­war Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al. (Copy­right 1999 [SC]; Autono­me­dia; ISBN 1–57027-039–2.)

1. The pro­gram begins with a sum­ma­ry by Mr. Coogan of Yockey’s life and work. A Nazi oper­a­tive before, dur­ing and after the Sec­ond World War, Yock­ey drew on a num­ber of philo­soph­i­cal inspi­ra­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly Oswald Spen­gler and his book The Decline of the West. See­ing the dis­in­te­gra­tion of the West in the First World War, the rise of Bol­she­vism and the Great Depres­sion, Yock­ey even­tu­al­ly became enam­ored of the fas­cist phi­los­o­phy. Dif­fer­ing from Hitler’s Nordic racial phi­los­o­phy, Yock­ey came to see a pan-Euro­pean fas­cism as a pre­scrip­tion for human polit­i­cal ills. His phi­los­o­phy was summed up in the vol­ume Imperi­um, ulti­mate­ly pub­lished and pub­li­cized by Willis Car­to and his Lib­er­ty Lob­by orga­ni­za­tion. High­lights of this part of the dis­cus­sion include: Yockey’s birth in Chica­go; his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Ger­man Amer­i­can Bund; his work as a Third Reich agent; his efforts in post­war Ger­many on behalf of Nazi war crim­i­nals on tri­al.

2. Fur­ther devel­op­ing prin­ci­pal ele­ments of the polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy of “Yock­ey­ism,” the pro­gram under­scores a num­ber of key dif­fer­ences between Yockey’s ideas and the tenets of “clas­si­cal” fas­cism and Nazism. Yock­ey saw poten­tial alliances between the fas­cist inter­na­tion­al and the for­mer Sovi­et Union, the People’s Repub­lic of Chi­na, Castro’s Cuba and the Third World as essen­tial to what he saw as an absolute necessity—the destruc­tion of the Unit­ed States as a pre­req­ui­site to the estab­lish­ment of the “Imperi­um.” Yock­ey hat­ed the U.S. and felt that the afore­men­tioned coun­tries and enti­ties (ranged as ene­mies of fas­cism in tra­di­tion­al fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy as well as “Cold War” phi­los­o­phy) were impor­tant to its even­tu­al anni­hi­la­tion. (It can be argued that much of the so-called pro­gres­sive sec­tor is, in effect, Yock­eyite in its man­i­fes­ta­tions and pronunciations—particularly in the after­math of 9/11.) High­lights of this part of the dis­cus­sion include: Yockey’s for­ma­tion of the neo-fas­cist Euro­pean Lib­er­a­tion Front; his arrest and sub­se­quent sui­cide in 1960; his asso­ci­a­tion with Lib­er­ty Lob­by king­pin Willis Car­to; his author­ship of World in Flames.

3. A major point of dis­cus­sion con­cerns the mys­te­ri­ous “Alexan­der Scharff,” with whom Yock­ey was stay­ing at the time of his arrest and sui­cide. Scharff ini­tial­ly claimed to be a Holo­caust sur­vivor who had assumed mul­ti­ple iden­ti­ties after the war. It appears that Scharff—who sub­se­quent­ly claimed the name of “Junger”—was (like Yock­ey) and under­ground, post­war fas­cist oper­a­tive. Scharff even­tu­al­ly fled to Cuba (one of the places that Yock­ey may have vis­it­ed.)

4. Con­clud­ing the broad­cast, the dis­cus­sion focus­es on the his­to­ry and evo­lu­tion of Ital­ian fas­cism. In par­tic­u­lar, the pro­gram high­lights the forces that have coa­lesced under the admin­is­tra­tion of Sil­vio Berlus­coni. A prin­ci­pal focal point is Giuseppe “Pino” Rauti, a vet­er­an Ital­ian fas­cist. High­lights of this por­tion of the broad­cast include: a brief his­to­ry of the Salo Republic—the rump Ital­ian fas­cist gov­ern­ment dur­ing the clos­ing phase of World War II; the evo­lu­tion of the Mus­soli­ni forces into the post­war MSI—the Ital­ian Social Move­ment; the fac­tion­al­iza­tion of the MSI; Rauti’s split from the MSI; the career of Prince Borgh­ese; the influ­ence of vet­er­ans of OVRA (Mussolini’s intel­li­gence ser­vice) on the devel­op­ment of the SID and SIFAR (post­war Ital­ian intel­li­gence agen­cies); Rauti’s for­ma­tion of the “Ordine Nuo­vo” (“New Order” in Eng­lish); the pro­found influ­ence of Julius Evola on the think­ing of Borgh­ese and Rauti.