This review of Kevin Coogan's book was published here last week. Due to the heavy turnover of stories currently, I felt that it was important to repost it to our front page. Readers should note that the stories listed on the right hand side of slash do not always appear on the main page, and are sometimes only visible within their section.(hydrarchist).

http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/yockey.html

"An American National Bolshevik," by Loren Goldner
(The following book review will appear in the journal Race Traitor, 2001. )

Review of Kevin Coogan's Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International. Autonomedia. New York, 1999. 642 pp. $16.95.

"Provincial patriotism of the nineteenth-century type can evoke no response. The unity of the West which the barbarian has always recognized is recognized at the last hour by the West itself."

"Western policy has the duty of encouraging in its education of the youth its manifestation of strong character, self-discipline, honor, ambition, renunciation of weakness, striving after perfection, superiority, leadership—in a word—Race."——Francis Yockey, Imperium, (1948).

Fascism in every country, until 1945, almost always conjured up archaic, pre-capitalist, pre-Enlightenment national myth for its symbolism: Mussolini and the Roman Empire, Franco and the Falange, Hitler and the Thousand-Year Reich. In the United States, the task was made more difficult by the absence, for the radical right, of a "usable" pre-capitalist past; for stone white supremacists, the Iroquois Nation or Yoruba culture would hardly do.


Fascism,  two world wars, the genocide of the Jews and gypsies,  and the weakening of the nation-state through exhaustion cast a cloud over nationalist archaisms in the advanced capitalist world after 1945 (the emerging Third World was of course another story). For these reasons, and because of an important internationalization of capitalism through U.S. world hegemony, it was inevitable that the radical right in the advanced capitalist countries would turn to archaic symbols connected to the West as a whole. Thus, throughout Europe and to some extent in the U.S.,  "Aryans" (the word having acquired a bad odor) were rebaptized Indo-Europeans, and highbrow intellectuals such as Martin Heidegger, Mircea Eliade, Marija Gimbutas, and Julius Evola created the high road for the rehabilitation of the old ideas, followed on lower roads by Atlantis buffs, occultists, Celtic tree-worshipers, fake Tibetologists, Wagner freaks, Holocaust deniers and Teutonic rune scholars.


Today, in Europe, including Russia, and to some extent in the United States, important factions of the radical right have quietly buried the old biological racism and the nationalist chauvinism of pre-1945 fascism. The most sophisticated figures, such as Alain de Benoist, freely quote from Antonio Gramsci (for which Gramsi is of course not to be blamed), argue that the old categories of "left" and "right" are dead(1), and insist that their desire to expel immigrants and Jews from Europe has nothing to do with "grandpa's fascism", but rather because they see such groups invariably as bearers of "other cultures", not inferior, mind you, but "different". These theorists have their own version of post-modern cultural relativism, and say that Jews, blacks and Arabs are fine-- just as long as they stay in their own countries, or return there, the sooner the better. The European radical right supported Iraq in the Gulf War, a type of "Third Worldism" that was marginal in Western interwar fascism (but not entirely absent, as we shall see).


What fascism hates above all is universalism, and it hates the Jews for having, through the monotheism they passed to Christianity, supposedly inflicted the "slave morality" (Nietzsche) of universalism on the "strong", "young", "nature-loving" "blond beasts", the Indo-Europeans and other pagans, and for having, through the ban on image-making, destroyed such peoples' pagan nature-worship and myth. Capitalism for the fascists mostly means finance capital, Jews and money; the link between monotheism and abstraction on one hand and commodity production and wage labor on the other is beyond their ken. Behind the hatred of universalism is the hatred of the idea of humanity, or what Marx called "species-being"; fascism sooner or later, and usually sooner, identifies some group, whether whites, or Teutons, or an aristocratic cultural elite, the "Uebermenschen" (supermen) as destined to dominate, or expel, or annihilate the "Untermenschen" (inferior beings), or, more up to date, those who are ineffably "different". The trendy post-modern left supports "difference" and argues for relativistic tolerance (which extends to tolerance of barbaric archaisms, such as cliterodectomy, among "subaltern peoples"), the hard radical right supports it to advocate (at least in its politer forms) removal, but both currents find themselves in profound agreement on the fundamental issue of the denial of humanity as a meaningful reality. Like their predecessors, the early 19th century enemies of the Enlightenment and the universalism of the French revolution, they "know Frenchmen, Germans, Italians and Greeks", but consider "man" a meaningless abstraction.


Thus the contemporary right-wing publicist Armin Mohler is not wrong to say that today's post-modernists are the bastard progeny of the Conservative Revolution of the 1920's (about which latter more below).


It is fairly well known that Hitler and the Nazis always insisted that they had learned a great deal from America, and in particular from the American eugenics movement, which preceded their own Social Darwinism, racial laws and ban on interracial marriage, doctrines of blood purity, and medical experiments on "Untermenschen", by decades.


What is less well known is that an American fascist theoretician, Francis Parker Yockey (1917–60), himself marginal in the American radical right even today, is actually a theoretical pioneer of the contemporary international fascist revival with its new cultural politics, and is recognized as such from France to Russia's contemporary "red-brown" ferment. (Yockey is promoted in the U.S., and somewhat disingenuously, mainly by Willis Carto and the Liberty Lobby.(2))


Contemporary fascism, internationally, finds it a largely losing battle to conjure up the old biological racism and master-race theories: they can chip away at the still-powerful association of such biological determinism with the concentration camps, but they have found a far more fertile path in circumventing such questions with a whole new battle over "culture". And once this is recognized, the centrality of Francis Yockey, the subject of the excellent book by Kevin Coogan under consideration here, and who spelled this out in his 1948 book Imperium, looms into view.

Read the rest of this review at:http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/yockey.html