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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.

II

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.

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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.

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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

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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.