Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #598 Interview with Kevin Coogan about Francis Parker Yockey

Record­ed May 20, 2007
MP3 Side 1 | Side 2
REALAUDIO

Intro­duc­tion: 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.

Discussion

3 comments for “FTR #598 Interview with Kevin Coogan about Francis Parker Yockey”

  1. Hel­lo Dave,

    I could­n’t find any post relat­ed to:

    The Fas­cist “Third Posi­tion”, The Far Right and Their Attempt to Co-opt Pro­gres­sive Forces

    so I chose this post, which is close­ly relat­ed. In fact, what Yock­ey tried to sys­tem­ize with his Third Posi­tion is some­thing, if I get the pic­ture cor­rect­ly, that was already under way even before WWII. Through my research, I have stum­bled upon a book by Jan Valtin, a ger­man com­mu­nist and sovi­et spy who was real­ly active in Ger­many between the two wars. In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Out of the Night he writes about his dai­ly life as a spy and a com­mu­nist activist. You will see that the union of Left and Right forces are not some­thing new. There is a URL on my site that you can vis­it at:

    http://lys-dor.com/2011/04/03/brown-and-red-fascists-united-their-forces-to-crush-the-social-democrats-of-germany/

    There are a cou­ple of extracts of this auto­bi­og­ra­phy that are pret­ty rev­e­la­to­ry of these mar­riages made in hell. And if you look around you, you will see they are going on in your own soci­eties. Exam­ples? The Tea Par­tys, Wik­ileaks, some­thing in the french-speak­ing world that is called islamo-gauchisme (islamo-left­ism), left and “demo­c­ra­t­ic” activists par­tic­i­pat­ing in the upris­ings in the Mid­dle East, etc. Basi­cal­ly, the whole Left has com­mit­ted trea­son against Social-Democ­ra­cy in favor of the Right, and Social-Democ­ra­cy, that’s us. Frankly, we are in trou­ble more that we think.

    Let our­selves have a good day...while we still can.

    Posted by Claude | April 4, 2011, 9:18 am
  2. [...] these mat­ters and you can get more details about that by lis­ten­ing to this inter­view with him on Dave Emory‘s show. Com­ing back to this Youtube video, just lis­ten to their rhetoric. You don’t [...]

    Posted by Harvard Square Palestinian activists: Are there any worst totalitarians than these? | lys-dor.com | September 1, 2011, 10:07 am
  3. [...] and I want to present it to you. Kevin Coogan, a mar­velous author, has writ­ten a book titled Dream­er of the Day: Fran­cis Park­er Yock­ey and the Post­war Fas­cist Inter­na­tional. This book presents the polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy of Fran­cis Park­er Yock­ey, a post-war fas­cist polit­i­cal [...]

    Posted by Ayers and Dohrn, Barack Obama, the death of Andrew Breitbart and the rise of Third Position fascism | Lys-d'Or | March 14, 2012, 10:25 am

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