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Yockey on Liberalism – Part 7

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Concluding this short series concerning Yockey’s Imperium, The 20th Century Political Outlook:

Hegel posited a three-stage development of mankind from the natural community through the bourgeois community to the State. His State-theory is thoroughly organic, and his definition of the bourgeois is quite appropriate for the 20th century. To him the bourgeois is the man who does not wish to leave the sphere of internal political security, who sets himself up, with his sanctified private property, as an individual against the whole, who finds a substitute for his political nullity in the fruits of peace and possessions and perfect security in his enjoyment of them, who therefore wishes to dispense with courage and remain secure from the possibility of violent death. He described the true Liberal with these words.

The political thinkers mentioned do not enjoy popularity with the great masses of human beings. As long as things are going well, most people do not wish to hear talk of power-struggles, violence, wars, or theories relating to them. Thus in the 18th and 19th centuries was developed the attitude that political thinkers — and Macchiavelli was the prime victim — were wicked men, atavistic, bloodthirsty. The simple statement that wars would always continue was sufficient to put the speaker down as a person who wanted wars to continue. To draw attention to the vast, impersonal rhythm of war and peace

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showed a sick mind with moral deficiency and emotional taint. To describe facts was held to be wishing them and creating them. As late as the 20th century, anyone pointing out the political nullity of the “leagues of nations” was a prophet of despair. Rationalism is anti-historical; political thinking is applied history. In peace it is unpopular to mention war, in war it is unpopular to mention peace. The theory which becomes most quickly popular is one which praises existing things and the tendency they supposedly illustrate as obviously the best order, and as preordained by all foregoing history. Thus Hegel was anathema to the intellectuals because of his State-orientation, which made him a “reactionary,” and also because he refused to join the revolutionary crowd.

Since most people wish to hear only soporific talk about politics, and not demanding calls to action, and since in democratic conditions it matters to political technics what most people wish to hear, democratic politicians evolved in the 19th century a whole dialectic of party-politics. The idea was to examine the held of action from a “disinterested” standpoint, moral, scientific, or economic, and to kind that the opponent was immoral, unscientific, uneconomic — in fact — he was political. This was devilishness that must be combated. One’s own standpoint was entirely “non-political.” Politics was a word of reproach in the Economic Age. Curiously however, in certain situations, usually those involving foreign relations, “unpolitical” could also be a term of abuse, meaning the man so described lacked skill in negotiating. The party-politician also had to feign unwillingness to accept office. Finally a demonstration of carefully arranged “popular will” broke down his reluctance, and he consented to “serve.” This was described as Macchiavellism, but obviously Macchiavelli was a political thinker, and not a camouflageur. A book by a party-politician

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does not read like The Prince, but praises the entire human race, except certain perverse people, the author’s opponents.

Yockey counterposed the liberal, i.e. someone who won’t take his own side, against the “political”, i.e. those who will. Today’s White politicians have “progressed” to the point where they are increasingly anti-White and openly take the side of the non-White Other.

Actually Machiavelli’s book is defensive in tone, justifying politically the conduct of certain statesmen by giving examples drawn from foreign invasions of Italy. During Macchiavelli’s century, Italy was invaded at different times by Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards and Turks. When the French Revolutionary Armies occupied Prussia, and coupled humanitarian sentiments of the Rights of Man with brutality and large-scale looting, Hegel and Fichte restored Macchiavelli once again to respect as a thinker. He represented a means of defense against a foe armed with a humanitarian ideology. Macchiavelli showed the actual role played by verbal sentiments in politics.

One can say that there are three possible attitudes toward human conduct, from the point of evaluating its motives: the sentimental, the realistic, and the cynical. The sentimental imputes a good motive to everybody, the cynical a bad motive, and the realistic simply seeks the facts. When a sentimentalist, e.g., a Liberal, enters politics, he becomes perforce a hypocrite. The ultimate exposure of this hypocrisy creates cynicism. Part of the spiritual sickness following the First World War was a wave of cynicism which arose from the transparent, revolting, and incredible hypocrisy of the little men who were presiding over affairs at that time. Macchiavelli had however an incorruptible intellect and did not write in a cynical spirit. He sought to portray the anatomy of politics with its peculiar problems and tensions, inner and outer. To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them. A tiny politician of the Liberal type even sought to prevent talk about the Third World War, after the Second. Liberalism is, in one word, weakness. It wants every day to be a birthday, Life to be a long party.

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The inexorable movement of Time, Destiny, History, the cruelty of accomplishment, sternness, heroism, sacrifice, superpersonal ideas — these are the enemy. Liberalism is an escape from hardness into softness, from masculinity into femininity, from History to herd-grazing, from reality into herbivorous dreams, from Destiny into Happiness. Nietzsche, in his last and greatest work, designated the 18th century as the century of feminism, and immediately mentioned Rousseau, the leader of the mass-escape from Reality. Feminism itself — what is it but a means of feminizing man? If it makes women man-like, it does so only by transforming man first into a creature whose only concern is with his personal economics and his relation to “society,” i.e., a woman. “Society” is the element of woman, it is static and formal, its contests are purely personal, and are free from the possibility of heroism and violence. Conversation, not action; formality, not deeds. How different is the idea of rank used in connection with a social affair, from when it is applied on a battlefield! In the field, it is fate-laden; in the salon it is vain and pompous. A war is fought for control, social contests are inspired by feminine vanity and jealousy to show that one is “better” than someone else.

And yet what does Liberalism do ultimately to woman: it puts a uniform on her and calls her a “soldier.” This ridiculous performance but illustrates the eternal fact that History is masculine, that its stern demands cannot be evaded, that the fundamental realities cannot be renounced, even, by the most elaborate make-believe. Liberalistic tampering with sexual polarity only wreaks havoc on the souls of individuals, confusing and distorting them, but the man-woman and the woman-man it creates are both subject to the higher Destiny of History.

Yockey saw liberalism as springing from the White mind, Western philosophy and specifically Rationalism, originating with John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the mid-18th century. More than once Yockey asserted that Rationalism, and thus liberalism, are based on the false premise that man is “good” by nature. He described liberalism as “Rationalism in politics”, a “mere negative” which weakens the State and makes it subservient to “society”, a loose grouping of free independent groups and individuals, a thoroughly liberal construct.

Yockey saw liberalism as “thinking about politics” rather than “political thinking”, opposed to Authority in any form, but most especially the State and the Church. He saw liberalism as outside and in violation of his Laws of Totality and Sovereignty, thus corrosive to political organisms and the friend-enemy disjunction which defines them. “[A]lways and only a disintegrating force”.

Yockey saw liberalism as individualistic, humanistic and materialistic. He noted Jeremy Bentham’s guiding principle, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. “The two poles of [Rationalism] are ‘the individual’ and ‘humanity.’ Anything separating them is ‘irrational.'” He deplored that liberalism enables wealthy individuals to become more important than political organisms, and to twist the “rule of law” to serve their own selfish interests. “In earlier times, war-peoples had subjugated trading-peoples, but no longer. Now trading-peoples step out as the masters of the earth.”

New (jewish) masters aside, Yockey saw a deluded sentimentalism in the liberal hope that elevating commerce and economics would end war, the harsh reality being that under this delusion wars had only become more devastating.

“The purest expression of the doctrine of Liberalism was probably that of Benjamin Constant.” Wikipedia contains some hints why Yockey saw Constant this way:

Constant’s repeated denunciation of despotism pervaded his critique of French political philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Abbé de Mably. These writers, influential to the French Revolution, according to Constant, mistook authority for liberty and approved any means of extending the action of authority.

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.

Regarding the principle of freedom in liberalism Yockey wrote:

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 atomism, in which not only the authority of the State is combated, but even the authority of society and the family.

At the same time a team of jews were hard at work attacking the White family and producing social atomism with The Authoritarian Personality.

However, Yockey saw the influence of jews as distinct from liberalism:

it is necessary to diagnose even now the serious illness of the Western Civilization as Liberalism complicated with alien-poisoning

In contrast to liberalism Yockey recommended Ethical Socialism, which Oswald Spengler called Prussianism. Spengler described the Prussian spirit as, “aristocratic virtue, of which few are possessed” and “a proud and exclusive Socialism for men of race, for the elect of life”. In other words the Aryan spirit, or the spirit of National Socialism.

Yockey described “true liberalism” as Hegel’s view of bourgeois – the individual against the whole, who values personal security over courage and a potentially violent death. Liberalism, in one word, is weakness. At the very end he connects liberalism to feminism, “an escape from hardness into softness, from masculinity into femininity”.

Yockey dedicated only 15 pages of his 619-page magnum opus to liberalism. In this series we have only barely probed his thoughts. Yockey’s words and style are deceptively simple. His ideas are rooted in and intertwined with historical and philosophical references which make true understanding difficult, even for those prepared to dig deeper. The effort is worth it, especially for thinkers looking for mental exercise and an excuse to trace through some of the vast history of European political thought. After having done so I can say that those less willing to embark on such excursions should feel no guilt or shame. There are more accessible works – e.g. by Kevin MacDonald or Revilo Oliver – from which one can learn more with less effort.

Yockey on Liberalism – Part 6

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Continuing with Imperium, The 20th Century Political Outlook, p215:

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.

This was political thinking, which is directed to the distribution and movement of power. It is also politics to expose the hypocrisy, immorality and cynicism of the usurer who loudly demands the rule of law, which means riches to him and poverty to millions of others, and all in the name of something higher, something with supra-human validity. When Authority resurges once more against the forces of Rationalism and Economics, it proceeds at once to show that the complex of transcendental ideals with which Liberalism equipped itself is as valid as the Legitimism of the era of Absolute Monarchy, and no more. The Monarchs were the strongest protagonists of Legitimism, the financiers of Liberalism. But the monarch was tied to the organism with his whole existence, he was responsible organically even where he was not responsible in fact. Thus Louis XVI and Charles I. Countless other monarchs and absolute rulers have had to flee because of their symbolic responsibility. But the financier has only power, no responsibility, not even symbolic, for, as often as not, his name is not generally known. History, Destiny, organic continuity, Fame, all exert their powerful influence on an absolute political ruler, and in addition his position places him entirely outside the sphere of base corruptibility. The financier, however, is private, anonymous, purely economic, irresponsible. In nothing can he be altruistic; his very existence is the apotheosis of egoism. He does not think of History, of Fame, of the furtherance of the life of the organism, of Destiny, and furthermore he is eminently corruptible by base means, as his ruling desire is for money and ever more money.

“The usurer” and “the financier” is best understood as jews, who do in fact care about the life of the jewish organism. George Soros is a contemporary example which comes immediately to mind. Names less generally known include Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson.

The Execution of Louis XVI, 1793, king of France 1774-1793. Charles I of England, monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1625 until his execution in 1649.

In his contest against Authority the finance-Liberal evolved

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a theory that power corrupts men. It is, however, vast anonymous wealth which corrupts, since there are no superpersonal restraints on it, such as bring the true statesman completely into the service of the political organism, and place him above corruption.

It was precisely in the fields of economics and law that the Liberal doctrine had the most destructive effects on the health of the Western Civilization. It did not matter much that esthetics became independent, for the only art-form in the West which still had a future, Western Music, paid no attention to theories and continued on its grand creative course to its end in Wagner and his epigones. Baudelaire is the great symbol of l’art pour l’art: sickness as beauty. Baudelaire is thus Liberalism in literature, disease as a principle of Life, crisis as health, morbidity as soul-life, disintegration as purpose. Man as individualist, an atom without connections, the Liberal ideal of personality. It was in fields of action rather than of thought that the injury was greatest.

Richard Wagner, German composer. Charles Baudelaire, French poet, member of the Decadent movement.

Allowing the initiative in economic and technical matters to rest with individuals, subject to little political control, resulted in the creation of a group of individuals whose personal wills were more important than the collective destiny of the organism and the millions of the population. The law which served this state of affairs was completely divorced from morality and honor. To disintegrate the organism from the spiritual side, what morality was recognized was divorced from metaphysics and religion, and related only to “society.” The criminal law reflected finance-Liberalism by punishing crimes of violence and passion, but not classifying such things as destroying national resources, throwing millions into want, or usury on a national scale.

The independence of the economic sphere was a tenet of

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faith with Liberalism. This was not subject to discussion. There was even evolved an abstraction named “economic man,” whose actions could be predicted as though economics were a vacuum. Economic gain was his sole motive, greed alone spurred him on. The technic of success was to concentrate on one’s own gain and ignore everything else. This “economic man” was however man in general to the Liberals. He was the unit of their world-picture. “Humanity” was the sum total of these economic grains of sand.

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The type of mind which believes in the essential “goodness” of human nature attained to Liberalism. But there is another political anthropology, one which recognizes that man is disharmonious, problematical, dual, dangerous. This is the general wisdom of mankind, and is reflected by the number of guards, fences, safes, locks, jails and policemen. Every catastrophe, fire, earthquake, volcanic eruption, flood, evokes looting. Even a police strike in an American city was the signal for looting of the shops by the respectable and good human beings.

Thus this type of thought starts from facts. This is political thinking in general, as opposed to mere thinking about politics, rationalizing. Even the wave of Rationalism did not submerge this kind of thinking. Political thinkers differ greatly in creativeness and depth, but they agree that facts are normative. The very word theory has been brought into disrepute by intellectuals and Liberals who use it to describe their pet view of how they would like things to be. Originally theory was explanation of facts. To an intellectual who is adrift in politics, a theory is an aim; to a true politician his theory is a boundary.

A political theory seeks to find from history the limits of the

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politically possible. These limits cannot be found in the domain of Reason. The Age of Reason was born in bloodshed, and will pass out of vogue in more bloodshed. With its doctrine against war, politics, and violence, it presided over the greatest wars and revolutions in 5,000 years, and it ushered in the Age of Absolute Politics. With its gospel of the Brotherhood of Man, it carried on the largest-scale starvation, humiliation, torture and extermination in history against populations within the Western Civilization after the first two World Wars. By outlawing political thinking, and turning war into a moral-struggle instead of a power-struggle it flung the chivalry and honor of a millennium into the dust. The conclusion is compelling that Reason also became political when it entered politics, even though it used its own vocabulary. When Reason stripped territory from a conquered foe after a war, it called it “disannexation.” The document consolidating the new position was called a “Treaty,” even though it was dictated in the middle of a starvation-blockade. The defeated political enemy had to admit in the “Treaty” that he was “guilty” of the war, that he is morally unfit to have colonies, that his soldiers alone committed “war crimes.” But no matter how heavy the moral disguise, how consistent the ideological vocabulary, it is only politics, and the Age of Absolute Politics reverts once again to the type of political thinking which starts from facts, recognizes power and the will-to-power of men and higher organisms as facts, and finds any attempt to describe politics in terms of morals as grotesque as it would be to describe chemistry in terms of theology.

Yockey describes what he means by Absolute Politics earlier in Imperium: “We stand at the beginning of the Age of Absolute Politics, and one of its demands is naturally for powerful weapons. Therefore, technics is ordered to strain after absolute weapons.”

“The Brotherhood of Man” was part of the (jewish) zeitgeist by the late 1940s. the White network – Race and Fraud: The Races of Mankind – Part 4 discusses an anti-“racist” cartoon by that title, which was based on the fraudulent pseudoscientific war-era propaganda produced by Franz Boas’ disciples Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish.

There is a whole tradition of political thinking in the Western Culture, of which some of the leading representatives are Montaigne, Macchiavelli, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Bossuet, Fichte, de Maistre, Donoso Cortes, Hippolyte Taine, Hegel, Carlyle.

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While Herbert Spencer was describing history as the “progress” from military-feudal to commercial-industrial organization, Carlyle was showing to England the Prussian spirit of Ethical Socialism, whose inner superiority would exert on the whole Western Civilization in the coming Political Age an equally fundamental transformation as had Capitalism in the Economic Age. This was creative political thinking, but was unfortunately not understood, and the resulting ignorance allowed distorting influences to fling England into two senseless World Wars from which it emerged with almost everything lost.

The contemporary view of Ethical socialism, as described by Wikipedia:

Ethical socialism is a political philosophy that appeals to socialism on ethical and moral grounds as opposed to economic, rationalist and materialist grounds.[1] It emphasizes the need for a morally conscious economy based upon the principles of service, cooperation, and social justice while opposing possessive individualism.[2] Therefore, in contrast to socialism inspired by rationalism, historical materialism, neoclassical economics and Marxist theory which base their appeals for socialism on grounds of economic efficiency, rationality or historical inevitability; ethical socialism focuses on the moral and ethical reasons for advocating socialism.

Ethical socialism is a form of liberal socialism closely related to Christian socialism, and had a profound impact on the social democratic movement and reformism during the later half of the 20th century, particularly in Great Britain.

Ethical socialism was advocated and promoted by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair

This cannot be the “Ethical Socialism” Yockey, the proud disciple of Spengler, had in mind. He referred instead to a distinction made by The Philosopher himself, in his essay “The Hour of Decision”, in 1933, which the synopsis at Amazon describes as:

An essay by the author of The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler, on the need for “Prussianism” in order to save civilization from the “Coloured Peril,” based on Spengler’s view, just after the Naxi rise to power in 1933, that the white (European) tribes were under attack by colored races through a “war” by various political forces – enemies of the white race.

Oswald Spengler – Prussian Socialism, via The Traditionalist, is an excerpt in which Spengler contrasts the nationalist/moral form of socialism with the economic/internationalist/jewish form:

Throughout the world they think of Socialism not as a moral attitude of life but as economic Socialism, Labour Socialism, as a mass ideology with material aims. Program Socialism of every sort is thinking from below, building on base instincts, canonizing the herd-feeling which everywhere today lurks behind the slogan of “overcoming individualism”; it is the contrary of Prussian feeling, which has livingly experienced through exemplary leaders the necessity of disciplined devotion and possesses accordingly the inward freedom that comes with the fulfilment of duty, the ordering of oneself, command of oneself, for the sake of a great aim.

Labour-Socialism in every form, on the other hand, is, as I have already shown, definitely English in origin. It arose, about 1840, simultaneously with the victory of the joint-stock company and the rootless “financial” form of capital. Both were the expression of Free Trade Manchesterism: this “white” Bolshevism is capitalism from below, wage-capitalism, just as speculative finance-capital in respect of its method is Socialism from above, from the stock exchange.

Prussian is, lastly, a character which disciplines itself, such as that of Frederick the Great, which he himself paraphrased as consisting in being the First Servant of the State. … To be a servant of the State is an aristocratic virtue, of which few are possessed. If this is “Socialistic,” it is a proud and exclusive Socialism for men of race, for the elect of life. Prussianism is a very superior thing which sets itself against every sort of majority- and mob-rule; above all, against the dominance of the mass character. Moltke, the great educator of the German officer, the finest example of true Prussianism in the nineteenth century, was thus constituted. Count Schlieffen summed up his personality in the motto: “Talk little, do much, be, rather than seem.”

This idea of a “Prussian” existence will be the starting-point for the ultimate overthrowing of the World Revolution. There is no other possibility. I said, as far back as 1919: Not everyone is a Prussian who is born in Prussia; the type is possible anywhere in the white world and actually occurs, though rarely. […] The Prussian idea is opposed to finance-Liberalism as well as to Labour-Socialism. Every description of mass and majority, everything that is “Left,” it regards as suspect. […] All really great leaders in history go “Right,” however low the depths from which they have climbed. It is the mark of the born master and ruler.

What Spengler saw as Prussian – “aristocratic virtue, of which few are possessed” and “a proud and exclusive Socialism for men of race, for the elect of life” – are traits Ricardo Duchesne attributes to Aryans.

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

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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.