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Yockey on Liberalism – Part 5

Imperium-cover

Deep in the weeds of Yockey’s critique of liberalism. Continuing with Imperium, The 20th Century Political Outlook, p212:

A moment’s reflection shows that Liberalism is entirely negative. It is not a formative force, but always and only a disintegrating force. It wishes to depose the twin authorities of Church and State, substituting for them economic freedom and social ethics. It happens that organic realities do not permit of more than the two alternatives: the organism can be true to itself, or it becomes sick and distorted, a prey for other organisms. Thus the natural polarity of leaders and led cannot be abolished without annihilating the organism. Liberalism was never entirely successful in its fight against the State, despite the fact that it engaged in political activity throughout the 19th century in alliance with every other type of State-disintegrating force. Thus there were National-Liberals, Social-Liberals, Free-Conservatives, Liberal-Catholics. They allied themselves with democracy, which is not Liberal, but irresistibly authoritarian in success. They sympathized with Anarchists when the forces of Authority sought to defend themselves against them. In the 20th century, Liberalism joined Bolshevism in Spain, and European and American Liberals sympathized with Russian Bolsheviks.

Liberalism can only be defined negatively. It is a mere critique, not a living idea. Its great word “freedom” is a negative–it means in fact, freedom from authority, i.e., disintegration of the organism. In its last stages it produces social

This is a reiteration of what we found earlier in Yockey’s description of political organisms, the friend-enemy disjunction, and the Laws of Totality and Sovereignty: liberalism is opposition to authority, a disintegrating force with dissolves political organisms and kills them dead.

Yockey’s view of democracy as “not Liberal, but irresistibly authoritarian in success” differs from the conventional view which conflates and even equates liberalism with democracy – e.g. “liberal democracy”. Yockey delves into democracy next, starting on page 224.

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atomism, in which not only the authority of the State is combated, but even the authority of society and the family. Divorce takes equal rank with marriage, children with parents. This constant thinking in negatives caused political activists like Marx, Lorenz v. Stein and Ferdinand Lasalle to despair of it as a political vehicle. Its attitudes were always contradictory, it sought always a compromise. It sought always to “balance” democracy against monarchy, managers against hand-workers, State against Society, legislative against judicial. In a crisis, Liberalism as such was not to be found. Liberals found their way on to one or the other side of a revolutionary struggle, depending on the consistency of their Liberalism, and its degree of hostility to authority.

Even while Yockey was writing this, a seminal assault on the authority of White society and families was on its way. The Authoritarian Personality came not from atomistic “liberals” but from jews obsessed with the best interests of their own collective organism:

The Authoritarian Personality is a 1950 sociology book by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley, during and shortly after World War II.

The Authoritarian Personality “invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the ‘F scale’ (F for fascist).”

The impetus of The Authoritarian Personality was the Holocaust, the attempted genocidal extinction of European Jews by Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party. Adorno had been a member of the “Frankfurt School”, a predominantly Jewish[7] group of philosophers and Marxist theorists who fled Germany when Hitler shut down their Institute for Social Research. Adorno et al. were thus motivated by a desire to identify and measure factors that were believed to contribute to antisemitic and fascist traits.

Here we see a contrast in personality traits of Whites and jews. Whites thought the war was over. Jews never stopped fighting. The jews find fault in White thinking. Whites, to the extent they even think about it, agree.

Back to Yockey:

Thus Liberalism in action was just as political as any State ever was. It obeyed organic necessity by its political alliances with non-Liberal groups and ideas. Despite its theory of individualism, which of course would preclude the possibility that one man or group could call upon another man or group for the sacrifice or risk of life, it supported “unfree” ideas like Democracy, Socialism, Bolshevism, Anarchism, all of which demand life-sacrifice.

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From its anthropology of the basic goodness of human nature in general, Rationalism produced 18th century Encyclopedism, Freemasonry, Democracy, and Anarchism, as well as Liberalism, each with its offshoots and variations. Each played its part in the history of the 19th century, and, owing to the critical distortion of the whole Western Civilization entailed by the first two World Wars, even in the 20th century, where Rationalism is grotesquely out of place, and slowly transformed itself into

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Irrationalism. The corpse of Liberalism was not even interred by the middle of the 20th century. Consequently it is necessary to diagnose even now the serious illness of the Western Civilization as Liberalism complicated with alien-poisoning.

Because Liberalism views most men as harmonious, or good, it follows that they should be allowed to do as they like. Since there is no higher unit to which all are tied, and whose superpersonal life dominates the lives of the individuals, each field of human activity serves only itself — as long as it does not wish to become authoritative, and stays within the framework of “society.” Thus Art becomes “Art for Art’s sake,” l’art pour l’art. All areas of thought and action become equally autonomous. Religion becomes mere social discipline, since to be more is to assume authority. Science, philosophy, education, all are equally worlds unto themselves. None are subject to anything higher. Literature and technics are entitled to the same autonomy. The function of the State is merely to protect them by patents and copyrights. But above all — economics and law are independent of organic authority, i.e., of politics.

Benjamin Constant, who in Yockey’s estimation was perhaps “the purest expression of the doctrine of Liberalism”, was an early popularizer of the expression art for art’s sake. Also:

A Latin version of this phrase, “Ars gratia artis”, is used as a motto by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and appears in the circle around the roaring head of Leo the Lion in its motion picture logo.

Thinking of and speaking to the future, Yockey describes the interplay of freedom, economics and law:

Twenty-first century readers will find it difficult to believe that once the idea prevailed that each person should be free to do as he pleased in economic matters, even if his personal activity involved the starvation of hundreds of thousands, the devastation of entire forest and mineral areas, and the stunting of the power of the organism; that it was quite permissible for such an individual to raise himself above the weakened public authority, and to dominate, by private means, the inmost thoughts of whole populations by his control of press, radio and mechanized drama.

They will find it more difficult yet to understand how such a person could go to the law to enforce his destructive will. Thus a usurer could, even in the middle of the 20th century,

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invoke successfully the assistance of the law in dispossessing any numbers of peasants and farmers. It is hard to imagine how an individual could injure the political organism more than by thus mobilizing the soil into dust, in the phrase of the great Freiherr von Stein.

Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein:

Heinrich Friedrich Karl Reichsfreiherr[a] vom und zum Stein (25 October 1757 – 29 June 1831), commonly known as Baron vom Stein, was a Prussian statesman who introduced the Prussian reforms that paved the way for the unification of Germany. He promoted the abolition of serfdom, with indemnification to territorial lords; subjection of the nobles to manorial imposts; and the establishment of a modern municipal system.

Stein was from an old Franconian family.

The Prussian reforms were liberalism in action and included emancipation of the jews.

But — this followed inevitably from the idea of the independence of economics and law from political authority. There is nothing higher, no State; it is only individuals against one another. It is but natural that the economically more astute individuals accumulate most of the mobile wealth into their hands. They do not however, if they are true Liberals, want authority with this wealth, for authority has two aspects: power, and responsibility. Individualism, psychologically speaking, is egoism. “Happiness” = selfishness. Rousseau, the grandfather of Liberalism, was a true individualist, and sent his five children to the foundling hospital.

Law, as a field of human thought and endeavor, has as much independence, and as much dependence as every other field. Within the organic framework, it is free to think and organize its material. But like other forms of thought, it can be enrolled in the service of outside ideas. Thus law, originally the means of codifying and maintaining the inner peace of the organism by keeping order and preventing private disputes from growing, was transmuted by Liberal thought into a means of keeping inner disorder, and allowing economically strong individuals to liquidate the weaker ones. This was called the “rule of law,” the “law-State,” “independence of the judiciary.” The idea of bringing in the law to make a given state of affairs sacrosanct was not original with Liberalism. Back in Hobbes’s day, other groups were trying it, but the incorruptible mind of Hobbes said with the most precise clarity that the rule of law means the rule of those who determine and administer the law,

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that the rule of a “higher order” is an empty phrase, and is only given content by the concrete rule of given men and groups over a lower order.

Who pays the piper calls the tune. He who administers the law rules.

Yockey on Liberalism – Part 4

jeremy_bentham_benjamin_constant

Getting now to the meat of what Yockey had to say about liberalism.

Continuing with Imperium, Chapter 2, p209:

When it turned its gaze to History, Rationalism saw the whole tendency as one toward Reason. Man was “emerging” during all those millennia, he was “progressing” from barbarism and fanaticism to enlightenment, from “superstition” to “science,” from violence to “reason,” from dogma to criticism, from darkness to light. No more invisible things, no more spirit, no more soul, no more God, no more Church and State. The two poles of thought are “the individual” and “humanity.” Anything separating them is “irrational.”

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This branding of things as irrational is in fact correct. Rationalism must mechanize everything, and whatever cannot be mechanized is of necessity irrational. Thus the entirety of History becomes irrational: its chronicles, its processes, its secret force, Destiny. Rationalism itself, as a by-product of a certain stage in the development of a High Culture, is also irrational. Why Rationalism follows one spiritual phase, why it exercises its brief sway, why it vanishes once more into religion — these questions are historical, thus irrational.

Liberalism is Rationalism in politics. It rejects the State as an organism, and can only see it as the result of a contract between individuals. The purpose of Life has nothing to do with States, for they have no independent existence. Thus the “happiness” of “the individual” becomes the purpose of Life. Bentham made this as coarse as it could be made in collectivizing it into “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” If herding-animals could talk, they would use this slogan against the wolves. To most humans, who are the mere material of History, and not actors in it, “happiness” means economic wellbeing. Reason is quantitative, not qualitative, and thus makes the average man into “Man.” “Man” is a thing of food, clothing, shelter, social and family life, and leisure. Politics sometimes demands sacrifice of life for invisible things. This is against “happiness,” and must not be. Economics, however, is not against “happiness,” but is almost co-extensive with it. Religion and Church wish to interpret the whole of Life on the basis of invisible things, and so militate against “happiness.” Social ethics, on the other hand, secure economic order, thus promote “happiness. “

This calls to mind Thomas Jefferson’s invokation of “pursuit of happiness”.

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on Jeremy Bentham:

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher and political radical. He is primarily known today for his moral philosophy, especially his principle of utilitarianism, which evaluates actions based upon their consequences. The relevant consequences, in particular, are the overall happiness created for everyone affected by the action. Influenced by many enlightenment thinkers, especially empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume, Bentham developed an ethical theory grounded in a largely empiricist account of human nature. He famously held a hedonistic account of both motivation and value according to which what is fundamentally valuable and what ultimately motivates us is pleasure and pain. Happiness, according to Bentham, is thus a matter of experiencing pleasure and lack of pain.

Bentham saw happiness in terms of pleasure and pain, not “economic wellbeing”. Back to Yockey:

Here Liberalism found its two poles of thought: economics and ethics. They correspond to individual and humanity. The ethics of course is purely social, materialistic; if older ethics is

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retained, its former metaphysical foundation is forgotten, and it is promulgated as a social, and not a religious, imperative. Ethics is necessary to maintain the order necessary as a framework for economic activity. Within that framework, however, “the individual” must be “free.” This is the great cry of Liberalism, “freedom.” Man is only himself, and is not tied to anything except by choice. Thus “society” is the “free” association of men and groups. The State, however, is un-freedom, compulsion, violence. The Church is spiritual un-freedom.

All things in the political domain were transvalued by Liberalism. War was transformed into either competition, seen from the economic pole, or ideological difference, seen from the ethical pole. Instead of the mystical rhythmical alternation of war and peace, it sees only the perpetual concurrence of competition or ideological contrast, which in no case becomes hostile or bloody. The State becomes society or humanity on the ethical side, a production and trade system on the economic side. The will to accomplish a political aim is transformed into the making of a program of “social ideals” on the ethical side, of calculation on the economic side. Power becomes propaganda, ethically speaking, and regulation, economically speaking.

Economics and ethics aren’t poles in the sense individuals and humanity are. In his view of rationalism/liberalism, economics and ethics aren’t opposed, the latter is based upon the former. The correspondence between indivduals and economics on the one hand, and between humanity and ethics on the other, also isn’t clear. Yockey’s point, I think, was that economics and ethics are connected to each other as well as to rationalism/liberalism. And even if we see economics and ethics as two somewhat independent axes, the two dimensional view they provide permits only a crimped and distorted perception of reality.

The more important polar opposites Yockey is trying to distinguish here are Liberalism and Authority.

The purest expression of the doctrine of Liberalism was probably that of Benjamin Constant. In 1814 he set forth his views on the “progress” of “man.” He looked upon the 18th century Enlightenment with its intellectualistic-humanitarian cast as merely preliminary to the true liberation, that of the 19th century. Economics, industrialism, and technics represented the means of “freedom.” Rationalism was the natural ally of this trend. Feudalism, Reaction, War, Violence, State, Politics, Authority — all were overcome by the new idea, supplanted by Reason, Economics, Freedom, Progress and Parliamentarism.

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War, being violent and brutal, was unreasonable, and is replaced by Trade, which is intelligent and civilized. War is condemned from every standpoint: economically it is a loss even to the victor. The new war technics — artillery — made personal heroism senseless, and thus the charm and glory of war departed with its economic usefulness. In earlier times, war-peoples had subjugated trading-peoples, but no longer. Now trading-peoples step out as the masters of the earth.

Wikipedia’s page on Benjamin Constant gives us some idea why Yockey regarded him as the “purest expression” of liberalism:

One of the first thinkers to go by the name of Liberal, Constant looked to Britain rather than to ancient Rome for a practical model of freedom in a large, commercial society. He drew a distinction between the “Liberty of the Ancients” and the “Liberty of the Moderns”.[10] The Liberty of the Ancients was a participatory, republican liberty, which gave the citizens the right to directly influence politics through debates and votes in the public assembly.[10] In order to support this degree of participation, citizenship was a burdensome moral obligation requiring a considerable investment of time and energy. Generally, this required a sub-society of slaves to do much of the productive work, leaving the citizens free to deliberate on public affairs. Ancient Liberty was also limited to relatively small and homogenous societies, in which the people could be conveniently gathered together in one place to transact public affairs.[10]

The Liberty of the Moderns, in contrast, was based on the possession of civil liberties, the rule of law, and freedom from excessive state interference. Direct participation would be limited: a necessary consequence of the size of modern states, and also the inevitable result of having created a commercial society in which there are no slaves but almost everybody must earn a living through work. Instead, the voters would elect representatives, who would deliberate in Parliament on behalf of the people and would save citizens from the necessity of daily political involvement.[10]

Moreover, Constant believed that in the modern world, commerce was superior to war. He attacked Napoleon’s martial appetite on the grounds that it was illiberal and no longer suited to modern commercial social organization. Ancient Liberty tended to be warlike, whereas a state organized on the principles of Modern Liberty would be at peace with all peaceful nations.

Wikipedia also notes:

Henri-Benjamin Constant was born in Lausanne to descendants of Huguenot Protestants who had fled from Artois to Switzerland during the Huguenot Wars in the 16th century.

The Huguenot Connection, at Jewish Ideas Daily, notes how Huguenots hid jews during World War II, and refers to “a long history of Huguenot affinity with the Jews, traceable to the origins of French Protestantism and ultimately to the biblically rooted theology of John Calvin, the “father” of Reform Protestantism”, and “the lasting Huguenot sympathy for the Jewish people”. The sidebar contains a link to another article, The Huguenots, the Jews, and Me, subtitled “A tale of French philo-Semitism”:

Although my language and culture are French, I often feel more comfortable—morally and intellectually—in Israel than I do in my own country.

Yet I do not (as far as I know) have a single drop of Jewish blood in my veins. Neither did I, nor any member of my family, convert to Judaism. But philo-Semitism, which often includes an emotional identification with the Jewish people, is part of the heritage of the community I was raised in: The French Huguenots, or Protestants.

“We are not many. But we French Huguenots . . . who know our own history are linked with the Jewish people by too many bonds of culture, history, and religious beliefs to betray that old alliance.”

The Huguenots and the Jews Entwined in the pathways of History indicates that the roots of this affinity are, at least in part, biological, owing to a substantial number of “conversions” by jews.

Yockey on Liberalism – Part 3

imperium

Yockey viewed liberalism as rooted in and a product of Western philosophy.

Encyclopedia Britannica on rationalism:

rationalism, in Western philosophy, the view that regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge. Holding that reality itself has an inherently logical structure

Rationalism has long been the rival of empiricism, the doctrine that all knowledge comes from, and must be tested by, sense experience.

In the debate between empiricism and rationalism, empiricists hold the simpler and more sweeping position, the Humean claim that all knowledge of fact stems from perception. Rationalists, on the contrary, urge that some, though not all, knowledge arises through direct apprehension by the intellect. What the intellectual faculty apprehends is objects that transcend sense experience—universals and their relations. A universal is an abstraction, a characteristic that may reappear in various instances: the number three, for example, or the triangularity that all triangles have in common. Though these cannot be seen, heard, or felt, rationalists point out that humans can plainly think about them and about their relations.

Continuing with Ulick Varange (Francis Parker Yockey) — Imperium, p 205, the section titled, The Two Political Anthropologies (those which posit a “naturally good” human nature, like liberalism, and those which see human nature as it is):

The leading 17th century political thinkers, like Hobbes and Pufendorff, looked upon the condition of “nature,” in which States existed, as one of continual danger and risk, in which those engaged in action were driven by all the instincts and impulses of the beasts — hunger, fear, jealousy, rivalries of all kinds, desire. Hobbes observed that true enmity is possible only between men, that the friend-enemy disjunction is as much deeper between men than between animals as the world of men is spiritually above the world of the beasts.

The key difference is that man has language, history and culture – and thus can coordinate and organize more comprehensively, across time as well as space. Consider, as an example of the depth of true enmity, the jews’ dictum: Never forgive, never forget.

The two political anthropologies are illustrated in the story, found in Carlyle, of the conversation between Frederick the Great and Sulzer, in which Sulzer was explaining the new discovery of Rationalism that human nature was essentially good. Ach, mein lieber Salzer, Ihr kennt nicht diese verdammte Rasse, said Friedrich — “You don’t know this damned race.”

The assumption of the goodness of human nature developed two main branches of theory. Anarchism is the result of radical acceptance of this assumption. Liberalism uses the assumption merely to weaken the State and make it subservient to “society.” Thomas Paine, an early Liberal, expressed the idea in a formula that remains valid for Liberalism today: Society is the result of

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our reasonably regulated needs; the State is the result of our vices. Anarchism is the more radical in proportion to the completeness of its acceptance of the human goodness assumption.

The idea of “balance of power,” a technic [technology or science] of weakening the State, is Liberal throughout. By this means the State is to be rendered subject to economics. It cannot be called a State theory, for it is a mere negative. It does not deny the State completely, but wants it decentralized and weakened. It does not want the State to be the center of gravity of the political organism. It prefers to think of the organism as “society,” a loose grouping of free and independent groups and individuals, whose freedom finds its sole limitation with the customary criminal law. Thus Liberalism has no objection to individuals being more powerful than the State, being above the law. What Liberalism dislikes is authority. The State, as the grandest symbol of authority, is hated. The two noble orders, as the symbols of authority, are likewise hated.

Yockey’s description of liberalisms symptoms fit, but his anthropomorphization of it – assigning it human-like motives and emotions – doesn’t. Rather than seeing liberalism as a philosophy about the meaning of humanity and society, he saw them both as integrally connected to liberalism, in contradistinction to politcal organisms and the friend-enemy disjunction, Law of Totality and Law of Sovereignty which define them.

Anarchism, the radical denial of the State, and of all organization whatever, is an idea of genuine political force. It is anti-political in its theory, but by its intensity it is political in the only way that politics can manifest itself, i.e., it can bring men into its service and range them against others as enemies. During the 19th century, anarchism was a force to be reckoned with, although it was nearly always allied with some other movement. Particularly in 19th and early 20th century Russia was anarchism a powerful political reality. It was known there as Nihilism. The local strength of anarchism in Russia was owing to its coincidental attractiveness for the tremendous anti-Western feeling under the thin Petrine crust. To be anti-Western was to be against everything, therefore anti-Western Asiatic negativism adopted the Western theory of Anarchism as its vehicle of expression.

“Petrine crust” refers to the influence of Peter the Great, emperor of Russia between 1682 and 1725.

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Liberalism, however, with its compromising, vague attitude, incapable of precise formulation, incapable also of rousing precise feelings, either affirmative or negative, is not an idea of political force. Its numerous devotees, in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries have taken part in practical politics only as the ally of other groups. It could not create an issue; it could not line up men as friends or enemies; therefore it was not a political idea, but only an idea about politics. Its followers had to be for or against other ideas as a means of expressing their Liberalism.

Anarchism was able to rouse men to sacrifice of life, not so Liberalism. It is one thing to die to wipe out all order, all State; it is quite another to die in order to bring about a decentralization of State power. Liberalism is in essence nonpolitical; it is outside of politics. It would like to have politics serve as the handmaid of economics and society.

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Liberalism

Liberalism is a most important by-product of Rationalism, and its origins and ideology must be clearly shown.

The “Enlightenment” period of Western history which set in after the Counter-Reformation laid more and more stress on intellect, reason and logic as it developed. By the middle of the 18th century this tendency produced Rationalism. Rationalism regarded all spiritual values as its objects and proceeded to revalue them from the standpoint of “reason.” Inorganic logic is the faculty men have always used for solving problems of mathematics, engineering, transportation, physics and in other non-valuing situations. Its insistence on identity and rejection of contradiction are practicable in material activity. They afford intellectual satisfaction also in matters of purely abstract thought, like mathematics and logic, but if pursued far enough they turn into mere techniques, simple assumptions whose only justification is empirical. The end of Rationalism is Pragmatism, the suicide of Reason.

To unpack that last sentence requires some understanding of the history of philosophy.

Encyclopedia Britannica on pragmatism:

pragmatism, school of philosophy, dominant in the United States in the first quarter of the 20th century, based on the principle that the usefulness, workability, and practicality of ideas, policies, and proposals are the criteria of their merit.

More on pragmatism can be found at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on John Dewey:

John Dewey was a leading proponent of the American school of thought known as pragmatism, a view that rejected the dualistic epistemology and metaphysics of modern philosophy in favor of a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as arising from an active adaptation of the human organism to its environment.

Back to Yockey:

This adaptation of reason to material problems causes all problems whatever to become mechanical when surveyed in

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“the light of reason,” without any mystical admixture of thought or tendency whatever. Descartes reasoned the animals into automata, and a generation or so later, man himself was rationalized into an automaton — or equally, an animal. Organisms became problems in chemistry and physics, and superpersonal organism simply no longer existed, for they are not amenable to reason, not being visible or measurable. Newton provided the universe of stars with a non-spiritual self-regulating force; the next century removed the spirit from man, his history and his affairs.

Reason detests the inexplicable, the mysterious, the half-light. In a practical problem in machinery or ship-building one must feel that all the factors are under his knowledge and control. There must be nothing unpredictable or out of control. Rationalism, which is the feeling that everything is subject to and completely explicable by Reason, consequently rejects everything not visible and calculable. If a thing actually cannot be calculated, Reason merely says that the factors are so numerous and complicated that in a purely practical way they render the calculation unfeasible, but do not make it theoretically impossible. Thus Reason also has its Will-to-Power: whatever does not submit is pronounced recalcitrant, or is simply denied existence.

When it turned its gaze to History, Rationalism saw the whole tendency as one toward Reason. Man was “emerging” during all those millennia, he was “progressing” from barbarism and fanaticism to enlightenment, from “superstition” to “science,” from violence to “reason,” from dogma to criticism, from darkness to light. No more invisible things, no more spirit, no more soul, no more God, no more Church and State. The two poles of thought are “the individual” and “humanity.” Anything separating them is “irrational.”

Interesting. Here Yockey attributes the suppression of nationalism and racialism (which separate the poles of individualism and humanism) to rationalism/liberalism, rather than jewish influence. In this I think he was wrong.

Yockey on Liberalism – Part 2

francis_parker_yockey_1960

Rusty’s comment provides another view of liberalism, as rebellion against natural law:

The more degenerate our society becomes, the more it seems to me that liberalism and sin are practically the same thing. The fountain of both are the same: the belief that one can break the rules of the universe and of God(s) and not have to face any consequences. All other errors (sins) follow from this basic rebellious notion.

Ted Sallis on Yockey’s liberalish-sounding concern about European inequality, intolerance:

Yockey was likely troubled by the idea of disjunctive subracial (e.g., Nordic/Alpine/Mediterranean) European subdivisions that considered these putative subraces as almost different species (with implications of superiority/inferiority). As a promoter of European unity, Yockey eagerly latched on to absurd Boasian counter-theories to invalidate what he saw as invidious and divisive distinctions among Europeans.

Yockey’s thoughts on both points can be found in Imperium, p.152. Here Yockey sets the stage for his assessment of liberalism by describing the definitive role of the “friend-enemy disjunction” for political organisms:

The Laws of Totality and Sovereignty

The organic Laws of Sovereignty and Totality refer to all political units whatever. They describe any unit, whatever its provenance, that reaches the degree of intensity of expression at which it participates in a friend-enemy disjunction. Totality refers both to issues within the organism and to persons within the organism. Any issue within the organism is subject to political determination, because every issue is potentially political. Any person in the organism is existentially embraced in the organism. Sovereignty places the decision in every important juncture with the organism. Both of these laws are existential, like all organic conditions: either the organism is true to them, or it is faced with sickness and death. Both laws will be explained.

First the Law of Totality: Any contrast, opposition, or hostility whatever existing within groups among the organism may become political in its nature, if it reaches the point where a group or a unit feels another group, class or stratum to be a real enemy. For such a unit to arise within an organism is for

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the possibility of civil war to be present, or a severe crisis in the organism, which renders the organism liable to damage or extinction from without. Therefore, every organism, by its very existence, has the characteristic that it assumes power over the determination of all issues. This does not mean that it plans the total life of the population — economic, social, religious, educational, legal, technical, recreational. It means merely that all of these things are subject to political determination. Many of these things are neutral to some States, but objects of interest to others. But all organisms will intervene when an inner grouping may possibly become a focus of a friend-enemy disjunction. This describes all political units whatever, entirely independently of how they formulate their written constitutions, if they have any.

The Law of Totality affects individuals by embracing them existentially in the life of the organism. Politics places the life of every man within the political unit in the balance. It demands, by its very existence, the readiness of all individuals in the service of its fulfillment to risk their lives. Other groups may demand dues, periodical attendance at meetings, investment of time in group projects. If they demand however — so fundamental is this organic law of totality — that the member plight his life to the group, they become therewith political. The French public law professor Haurion designated it as the hall-mark of a political unit that it embraced the individual entirely, whereas non-political groups embrace him only partially.

This is the Law of Totality in other words. It is thus a touchstone of a group for this purpose whether it demands an existential oath.

If a group extracts such an oath from members, the group is political. This Law of Totality, it is hardly necessary to add, is

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not at all derived from conscription for military service. Conscription exists only for a few centuries within a High Culture, whereas the Law of Totality describes the Culture itself when it is itself constituted as a political organism, and, during the period of concentration of politics in Culture-States, it describes every individual State. Like all organic laws it is existential: if any inner force can challenge it, the organism is sick; if the challenge is attended with success, the organism is in severe crisis and may be annihilated. In any case, its unity will be temporarily in abeyance, with the possibility of partitioning by outer powers.

The Law of Sovereignty is the inner necessity of organic existence which places the decision in every important juncture with the organism, as opposed to allowing any group within to make the decision. An important juncture is any one which affects the organism as a whole, its steering in the world, its choice of allies and enemies, the decision of war and peace, its inner peace, its unchallenged inner right to decide controversies. If any of these can be called into question, it is a sign that the organism is sick. In the healthy organism, this sovereignty is absolutely undisputed, and may continue so for centuries. But a new age with new interests may raise contrasts which the rulers do not grasp; they may blunder, and find themselves on the defensive in a civil war. The challenge of the sovereignty of the organism was the first symptom of crisis. If the organism survives the crisis, the new rulers of the same organism will be the focus of the same sovereignty.

An important fact has been touched upon with this: it is not the rulers who are sovereign within the meaning of this law. Their powers in fact are derived from their symbolic-representative position. If a stratum represents and acts in the Spirit of the Age, revolution against it is impossible. An organism true to itself cannot be sick or in crisis.

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The Law of Sovereignty does not mean that every aspect of group life within the organism is dominated at all times by the political, nor that everything is organized, or that a centralized system of government necessarily reaches out always and destroys every organization of whatever kind. The outlook developed here is purely factual, and the Law of Sovereignty describes all political organisms; it is a formulation in words of a quintessential characteristic of a political organism.

Yockey’s laws are existential. Political organisms which violate The Law of Totality, through division, die. Those which violate the Law of Sovereignty, by loss of self-consciousness and self-rule, also die.

Yockey’s view, almost seventy years on, remains relevant. Though the Spirit of the Age, the zeitgeist, the “philosophy of society”, continues to mutate, it is still called “liberalism”. The rule of an implacably hostile, judaized elite and their multicultural/multiracial divide-and-conquer ideals flout both of Yockey’s laws. The prognosis for the political organisms which embrace such “liberalism” is increasingly obvious – sickness and death.

With this groundwork laid, we move now to Yockey’s analysis of the origins and traits of what he called liberalism. Skipping ahead to p.204, he identifies the key false premise as a misunderstanding of human nature:

The Two Political Anthropologies

The touchstone of any political theory whatever is its attitude to the fundamental ethical quality of human nature. From this standpoint there are only two kinds: those which posit a “naturally good” human nature, and those which see human nature as it is on the other hand. Good has meant reasonable, perfectible, peaceful, educable, desiring to improve, and various other things.

Every Rationalistic political or State theory regards man as “good” by nature. The Encyclopedists, the Illuminati and the devotees of Baron Holbach’s philosophy were all symptomatic of the advent of Rationalism in the 18th century. All talked of “the essential goodness of human nature.” Rousseau was the most forceful and radical of 18th century writers in this respect. Voltaire set himself apart by denying totally this essential goodness of human nature.

It is curious that a theory of politics could ever possibly ground itself on such an assumption, since politics actualizes itself only in the form of the friend-enemy disjunction. Thus a

205

theory of hostility assumes that human nature is essentially peaceable and non-hostile.

The middle of the 18th century is the beginning of the word liberalism, and of the idea-complex liberalism. Since human nature is basically good, there is no need to be strict with it, one can be “liberal.” This idea was derived from the English Sensualist philosophers. The Social Contract theory of Rousseau originated with the Englishman Locke in the previous century. All Liberalism predicates a sensualistic, materialistic philosophy. Such philosophies are rationalistic in tendency, and Liberalism is simply one variety of politically applied rationalism.

The delusion that human nature is basically good fuels the “liberal” drive for freedom and equality. Taken to its usual universalist extreme, it also fits the view of “liberalism” as the delusion that everybody is “us”. “Liberals” don’t need to take their own side because they see only one side, the side they imagine everyone (except White “racists”) is already on.

Yockey on Liberalism – Part 1

yockey

Revilo Oliver wrote The Shadow of Empire: Francis Parker Yockey After Twenty Years in June of 1966. Oliver regarded “the great problem of history” to be whether “cataclysmic changes [e.g. the British conquest of India and subsequent withdrawal] are wrought by the weakness and folly of men or by blind and ineluctable forces of nature”. Oliver noted:

The great modern philosopher of history is, of course, Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West formulated the problem in terms so clear and universal that everything written on the subject since 1918 has perforce had to be a commentary on Spengler — an attempt to extend, modify, or refute his magisterial synthesis.

Oliver described the connection between Spengler’s work and Yockey’s:

Francis Parker Yockey proudly proclaimed himself the disciple of the man to whom he often refers as simply The Philosopher

Oliver on Yockey’s Imperium:

This is not a book for “liberal intellectuals” or other children. No man can study history until he has learned that he must study it objectively and dispassionately, without reference to his emotions or predilections.. Whether you view Caesar with admiration or horror, whether you love or hate him, has nothing whatever to do with the fact that he was victorious at Pharsalus.

No man should consider problems in historionomy if he does not realize that the only question before him will be the accuracy of the diagnosis or prognosis. The validity of the analysis does not in the least depend on the reader’s emotional reaction to the future that it portends. When a physician diagnoses diabetes or arteriosclerosis or cancer, the only question is whether he has observed the symptoms accurately and reasoned from them correctly. Our wish that the patient did not have the disease is utterly irrelevant.

Infantile minds, accustomed to living almost entirely in the vaporous realm of their own imagination, are incapable of distinguishing between reality and their own fancies. That is why I counsel “liberal intellectuals” not to read Imperium. If they are able to understand it, the book will certainly send them into a tantrum and may induce a paroxysmic fit. They had better stay in their academic lecture-halls or other play-pens, where they can be happy making mud-pies, which they can call “world peace” and about which they can dance in a circle, chanting

Higgledy-piggledy, my fat hen,
Now we’ve got a big U.N.

I also hope that Imperium will not fall into the hands of tenderhearted Conservatives who want to Love Everybody. Those dear ladies have noble souls, but they are much too good for this world.

Oliver also expressed some concerns about Spengler, Yockey and Imperium:

Spengler assumed such plasticity of human nature that he greatly underestimated and almost ignored the biological differences between human beings. Spengler was deceived by the pseudo-scientific data forged or distorted by the school of Franz Boas

Spengler cites Boas with unjustified respect, and Yockey follows Spengler, though with some prudent reservations. Both try to refute genetics by citing examples of apparently total cultural assimilation; they do not see that these could be explained by phenomena they recognize elsewhere: the cultural passivity of the majority in all nations and cultures, and the tendency of isolated individuals to adapt themselves to the society in which they find themselves. It is true that Orientals in the West have conformed, with apparent eagerness and sincerity, to Occidental culture; it is also true that white men have “gone native” among the American Indians and Polynesians. The one example proves no more than the other.

Race Ignored

Spengler virtually ignores race as a biological reality and even uses the word “race” in a non-biological sense to designate full participation in a culture.

See my previous work on race and anthropology and race and fraud for more information about Franz Boas and how the jewish intellectual movement known as Boasian anthropology derailed race science.

For Yockey, the question is less critical than for Spengler. Yockey is concerned primarily with showing that “race-differences between White men, which means Western men, is vanishingiy small” in comparison with the gulfs that separate Western men from Negroes and Orientals. That, no one can deny.

Imperium contains a number of historical oversights and lapses, such as are inevitable when a man tries to generalize from a vast mass of complex details — inevitable even when the author writes in a well-stocked library after decades of intensive study and meditation. Yockey, it must be remembered, was a young man of thirty-one, by profession a lawyer, who wrote in a room of an isolated inn on the lonely shore of the Irish Sea north of St. George’s Channel — wrote from memory in a fire of inspiration and while still feeling the moral revulsion caused, by his participation in the early stages of the obscene farce that was enacted at Nuremberg to provide a hypocritical pretext for the lynchings that the United States carried out as a pawn of the International Communist Conspiracy. I shall merely list the three most conspicuous historical errors.

In Oliver’s estimation Yockey did not fully grasp the long-term, biological nature of the jewish problem:

The Jewish Race

(3) When Yockey concluded that the Jewish “race” (in his non-biological sense of the word) was formed by the ghettoes of Mediaeval Europe, he probably did not know that the historical record extends over twenty-five centuries. There is no reason to suppose that the Jews who migrated to the Mediaeval cities and established their ghettoes aroused more resentment among the Christian populations than the Jews who settled on an island in the Nile near the First Cataract aroused among the native Egyptian population in the fifth century B.C. Yockey’s mistake, by the way, vitiates the parallel that he draws between the Jews in Europe and the Parsees in India.

Such errors of detail do not invalidate the general thesis of Imperium. Yockey’s analysis of the forces that are eroding our civilization is significantly supported by the fact that Lawrence R. Brown, who wrote when Imperium was almost unprocurable and seems never to have heard of it, reached substantially the same conclusions by an entirely different method in his learned and lucid work, The Might of the West (New York, Obolensky, 1963). And in several distinct areas, the future that Yockey forecast in 1947 seems to be taking shape before our eyes today. Imperium is not a revelation of an ineluctable future, but it is a work that we must study and ponder, if we would act intelligently in our time.

Even so, Oliver still saw value in Yockey’s work:

The great value of Imperium is that it forces us to reconsider our position realistically.

The liberalism Yockey critiques seems quite distinct from what I have so far discussed in What is Liberalism?, Liberalism as a Death Wish and Liberalism as a Suicide Pact. Yockey’s view of liberalism seems similar to Guessedworker’s view, in that both regard liberalism as an irrepressible expression of European man. Next time we’ll compare Yockey’s points with the broader philosophy-of-society liberalism we have previously explored.

My attempt to understand liberalism is an attempt to understand the cataclysmic changes wrought in its name. The answer, it seems, is not in either man or nature, but in both, in man’s nature. As difficult as it may be to overcome our nature, those of us who struggle to understand this nature, and to communicate our understanding to others, do so only because we do wish to overcome it.

Ted Sallis noted Kerry Bolton’s New Yockey Biography Project at The Occidental Observer. Sallis echoed Oliver’s concerns:

Many of Yockey’s ideas on biological race specifically, and on science and scientific topics generally, are not only ludicrous but just plain wrong. Objectively wrong. With respect to race, I suspect that the views of Yockey (and Evola as well) were negatively influenced by some of the racial theories popular before WWII, and still extant today, particularly in the American “movement.” In other words, I don’t think Yockey had any problem with the major racial (e.g., European/African/Asian) distinctions; instead, Yockey was likely troubled by the idea of disjunctive subracial (e.g., Nordic/Alpine/Mediterranean) European subdivisions that considered these putative subraces as almost different species (with implications of superiority/inferiority). As a promoter of European unity, Yockey eagerly latched on to absurd Boasian counter-theories to invalidate what he saw as invidious and divisive distinctions among Europeans.

You can find more information about Francis Parker Yockey and Imperium at Metapedia.