THE ENEMY OF OUR ENEMIES
A Critique of Francis Parker Yockey’s The Enemy of Europe
by Professor Revilo P. Oliver
WHEN Francis Parker Yockey completed and published Imperium in 1948, he wrote a comparatively short sequel or pendant to his major work. This sequel, which he later entitled The Enemy of Europe, is now lost, but he had his manuscript with him when he was in Germany in 1953, and, after revising two passages to take account of events since 1948, he had it translated into German and printed at Frankfurt-am-Main in an edition of two hundred copies. Yockey’s work displeased the Jews, who accordingly ordered their henchmen to raid the printing plant, punish the printer, smash the types, and destroy all copies of the book. Yockey escaped and fortunately had already sent several copies abroad, and it is from a photocopy of one of these that Mr. Francis has tried to restore Yockey’s English text, so far as possible.
The Enemy of Europe is a work of great philosophical, historical, and political significance because
1) In it Yockey applies to the contemporary situation of the world the philosophy of history that he elaborated in Imperium, much as Spengler in Die Jahr der Entscheidung applied to the world of 1933 the philosophical theory he had expounded in his Untergang des Abendlandes.
2) It is the earliest coherent expression of a political attitude in Europe which first became manifest to Americans in the late 1950s and which at the present time largely determines the conduct of the various European nations in their relations with the United States and the Soviet Union. This attitude, which is generally misunderstood because, for the most part, Europeans cautiously use in public only equivocal or vague terms to intimate or disguise what Yockey said explicitly and without diplomatic subterfuge, was quickly imitated in other parts of the world and is commonly designated by such terms as ‘neutralism,’ ‘uncommitted nations,’ and ‘The Third World.’
3) Yockey’s analysis of the situation when he wrote poses today the most urgent question before intelligent Americans and, indeed, all other members of our race–a question of political fact that each of us must solve, at least provisionally, before he can estimate the chances that our species will survive on this globe.
It will be proper, therefore, to examine, as summarily as possible, each of these three aspects of The Enemy of Europe. Before we do so, however, it behooves us to say something about the only text in which Yockey’s work is now available.
Yockey’s manuscript, as I have said, has disappeared and must be presumed lost. (1) We may conjecture that it was in Frankfurt when the subjugated Germans’ Thought Police (2) burned, as they thought, all copies of the German edition, and that they found and burned it at the same time. So far as I know, the identity of the translator, who did the work for a small fee, (3) is now unknown, possibly even to the Jews, who, despite the efficiency of their espionage service, which is by far the finest and most formidable in the entire world, seem not to have known that a few copies of Der Feind Europas escaped the destruction they had ordered.
(1. Yockey seems not to have made a carbon copy, an unfortunate omission. The distinguished foreign correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, Donald Day, wrote, on the basis of his own observations, a book, Onward, Christian Solders, to tell the truth about events in northern Europe during the years in which preparations were being made for the attack on Germany by the Jews’ Aryan dupes in 1939. His typewritten manuscripts appears to have been destroyed in connection with the vicious persecution to which Day was subjected by the Jews’ government in Washington, prevented him from ever returning to his own country. He kept a carbon copy, however, from which the greater part of his book was eventually published, first in a mimeographed transcription, and then in a printed volume. For the details, see Liberty Bell, January 1983, pp. 27-34. A Swedish translation of Day’s book was published in 1944, from which chapters and sections missing in the incomplete edition of Day’s book now in print were translated back into English by Paul Knutson and published in Liberty Bell, June 1984, pp. 1-40.)
(2. The raid was officially carried out by an agency of the nominally German government that was set up in the western part of the conquered territory and given “virtual sovereignty” in 1952, the Bundesnachrichtendienst Abteilung K-16, a counterpart (or subsidiary) of “our” C.I.A. Its official functions are to control the Communists, work in which it has been notoriously unsuccessful, to terrorize Germans who seem not to have learned that they must venerate the Jews, and to help God’s People hunt down Germans who were loyal to their country before it was destroyed in 1945 and have failed subsequently to cringe before the Master Race to which Yahweh, by a famous Covenant (B’rith), deeded ownership of the entire world and all the lower animals in it, including, of course, the fatuous Aryans.)
(3. It is reported that a man, unnamed but identified as a German, was arrested in Frankfurt and punished as the translator of forbidden thought. Since, as I shall mention shortly, it is scarcely credible that the translator was a native German, we may conjecture that the man, who was perhaps caught with Yockey’s manuscript in his possession, accepted the blame to shield the real translator (perhaps a woman), perhaps thereby facilitating Yockey’s escape from Frankfurt. A memorandum in Yockey’s handwriting indicates that when the book went to press, he still owed the translator $45.00; from this it may be inferred that the total fee was not large, perhaps twice that amount. A man whose knowledge of Yockey’s career far exceeds my own believes that the memorandum was disingenuous and that Yockey himself produced the German version, and supports his opinion by a stylistic analysis that does show that, in all probability, the translation was made by an American. Since he admits that the only evidence is “indirect and circumstantial,” I elect to accept Yockey’s memorandum at its face value here and leave the decision to Yockey’s future biographer. The details of an author’s life may be interesting in themselves, but are seldom relevant to the worth of a literary or philosophical work. As Flaubert said, “L’homme, c’est rien; l’oevre, c’est tout.”)
The Jews are almost invariably accurate in statements of verifiable fact that they include in the data compiled for the use of the cowboys who ride herd on their Aryan cattle. I note that in one such compilation, dated May 1969, they boast that Yockey’s “pamphlet for distribution in the United States” was evidently printed but “confiscated by the Federal authorities,” and that the manuscript of his unfinished book, The American Destiny, was seized when he was arrested by their Federal Agents. (4) Then follows, in the list of writings of the hated goy, this odd entry:
Enemy of Europe (completed book but never published as manuscript was to be translated into German).
It would appear, therefore, that they were satisfied that all vestiges of the printed edition had been successfully effaced.
(4. Yockey, whose passport had been confiscated by the State Department to prevent him from returning to the United States, entered the country on a forged passport in San Francisco, where he was the guest of a Jew in whom he had, for some reason, placed confidence. He was arrested, thrown into prison, held under a vindictively exorbitant bail, and found dead in his cell, reportedly a suicide. The Jew in whose home he had stayed disappeared until after Yockey was dead, and was found to have sneaked into the United States under an assumed name with a fraudulent passport, but no one, surely, would be so “anti-Semitic” as to suppose that God’s Own People are amenable to laws that are enforced against the lower races. You may be quite certain, of course, that the manuscript of The American Destiny will never be found, whether it was burned or is now in the files of the Federal Bureau of Intimidation. A short essay entitled “The Destiny of America,” which may be an extract from the unfinished book, was mimeographed and distributed privately in 1955; by an audacious but not unprecedented plagiarism, a would-be “leader” of the American “right-wing” then published it, with additions, under his own name. The theme of Yockey’s book may be deduced from an essay, “The World in Flames,” that was published as a booklet by his friends in 1961, shortly after his death. Both essays are reproduced in the booklet, Four Essays, now available from Liberty Bell Publications.)
I remark in passing that American “Liberals” are wont to yap about “book burning,” but that is merely characteristic hypocrisy. Everyone knows that well-conditioned “intellectuals,” their little minds sodden with the degrading superstitions that are injected into white children in the public boob-hatcheries, like well-trained dogs, never bark when their masters have enjoined silence. It is hard to believe, however, that the “intellectuals,” unlike the dogs, never perceive the inconsistency of their conduct–not even when they refrain from complaining about the total destruction of books that are disapproved by Jews.
From a photocopy of one surviving copy of the German book an attempt to restore Yockey’s English text has been made by Mr. Francis whom I know only through some correspondence and conversations over the telephone. No one will expect the retroversion to be precisely what Yockey wrote, but we must specifically note that Mr. Francis has acquitted himself of a very difficult task.
All that remains of Yockey’s original are five paragraphs that do not appear in the German translation. It seems that when he sent his book to press, he extracted those paragraphs from his own “Introductory Note” and planned to have them printed as a preface signed by a friend who was going to contribute half of the cost of printing. (5) The friend evidently declined the honor: he may have been unwilling to expose himself to punishment by the Jews or he may have decided not to remit the $210.00 that Yockey believed he had promised. (6) Mr. Francis has restored these paragraphs to their logical place in Yockey’s introduction. For all the rest of the book, he had to work from the German translation.
(5. Yockey added, for the proposed preface, an introductory sentence, which he squeezed in at the top of the typewritten page. The clause in the first paragraph, “Having lived for several decades in America,” was originally intended to refer to himself, being strictly true (he was born in Chicago, 18 September 1917) but designed to conceal the nationality of the author of Imperium and Der Feind Europas, which were published under the pseudonym Ulick Varange. In his introduction to the American edition of Imperium, Willis A. Carto explains the pseudonym thus: “Ulick is an Irish given name…and means ‘reward of the mind.’ Varange, of course, refers to the Varangians, that far-roving band of Norse heroes led by Rurick who…came to civilize Russia in the 9th Century….The name, therefore, drawn as it is from the Eastern and Western antipodes of Europe, signifies a Europe united ‘from the rocky promontories of Galway to the Urals.’ ” Perhaps, but the Varangians are best known as the Norse mercenaries who formed the ‚lite corps of Byzantine armies, and Ulick is the early Erse adaptation, from the Latin Ulixes, of the name of the great Aryan hero, celebrated for his courage and practical wisdom, who, at the very beginning of the epic, is described as having wandered for many years after the fall of the sacred city of Ilium, which his fellow Greeks destroyed, and having seem many foreign cities and observed the character of many tribes of men. Both names, therefore, connote a stranger in a strange land. Yockey felt himself a stranger in an America that had lost its early Western culture and become a colony ruled by its Jewish masters (see Part Two below). It would be otiose to speculate whether Yockey remembered the etymology of Odysseus in the epic (XIX, 407 sqq.) or had in mind the fact that the Byzantine Empire was inhabited by diverse and mostly mongrelized peoples and infested by Jews.)
(6. The facts could doubtless be ascertained, but they are irrelevant to the philosophical and political significance of Yockey’s book, and I leave the task of ascertaining them to a future biographer.)
I cannot believe that German was the translator’s native language. His occasional errors in syntax are not what one would expect of a young person whose education had been interrupted by the European catastrophe, and while some of the awkwardness of his version suggests the sloppiness of the worst German journalism, they correspond much more closely to the paraphrases and circumlocutions in which we indulge when we are speaking a foreign language in which we have not learned to think, cannot call to mind a precise equivalent of an English expression, and try to make our meaning clear as best we may. And we may be certain that Yockey’s command of German was not adequate to enable him to revise and polish a translation that is always pedestrian and sometimes worse. He could doubtless speak German sufficiently for ordinary conversation and to write short letters, but it is significant that he read and quoted Spengler in the English translation by Charles Francis Atkinson. It is true that Atkinson was a great translator whose versions from Spengler and Friedell accurately represent the German in English so impeccable, fluidly idiomatic, and, on occasion, eloquent that they set a standard that few translators from one language to another can hope to approach; but nevertheless, it is hard to believe that Yockey would not at least have read the original texts, had he felt at home in literary and philosophical German. That he did not do so may reasonably be inferred from the fact that, as Mr. Francis discovered, in the manuscript that Yockey gave to the German translator, he quoted Spengler in Atkinson’s translation, and the translator, instead of supplying the corresponding text from Spengler’s German, simply retranslated Atkinson’s English into German, somewhat distorting the meaning in a way that gives us no high estimate in his competence in either language. (7)
(7. A good and probative example is the epigraph prefixed to Chapter 1, ch. 4 (p. 29 of the German edition), which is a rather loose translation of Atkinson’s The Hour of Decision, p. 205, which is an accurate translation from Spengler’s Die Jahre der Entscheidung, p. 148 in the first edition (1933). Even though Yockey’s German translator was poorly paid, he can scarcely be forgiven such negligence, unless he had to work in great haste or under very adverse conditions.)
Mr. Francis’s retroversion is the accomplishment of an arduous task. He had to decide where the German translator was content to approximate the meaning of the English before him rather than render it precisely or even altered a logical sequence of ideas to shirk the labor of transferring the argument from one language into another in which the normal order of words and clauses is quite different. A comparison of some passages of the retroversion with the corresponding German satisfies me that Mr. Francis has approximated Yockey’s original as closely as is possible in the present circumstances. In what follows here, my reference will be to pages of his work.
I need not remark that the formulation, or the criticism, of a philosophy of history is a task suited only to the comparatively rare minds, probably found only in our race, who can attain a perfectly dispassionate and relentless objective attitude of intellectual detachment from their personal wishes, sympathies, and even instinctive loyalties, at least during their consideration of the problems involved. Persons who have psychic fixations on gods or other praeternatural powers in whose existence they find it comforting to believe, or who feel an uncontrollable impulse to eulogize the “greatest nation on earth” or some ideological savior, or whose vanity must be salved by faith in the immortal excellence of their race, caste, or clique, should be advised not to disturb their glands with reading that cannot fail to affect adversely their equanimity and their blood pressure.
It is less obvious, perhaps, that every man who tries to elicit natural laws from the records of human history will inevitably make errors in matters of detail that need not impugn the validity of his general theory. A synoeretical view of human history or of the history of our race must be based in large part on secondary sources, since no man can learn all of the relevant languages or find time, in the short span of human life, to read and ponder all of the practically innumerable archaeological and philological reports and studies that may (or may not) in some way alter our understanding of the past. To demand of a vast theoretical and philosophical construction absolute accuracy in all details, as the little men who have long been barking at Spengler’s heels would have us do, is as absurd as to demand that every square centimeter of St. Peter’s in Rome or Westminster Abbey be finished with the accuracy of well-cut diamond. Even if a man is not betrayed, humanitus, by the lability of his own memory when it is charged with almost infinite details, he must, for a large part of his survey, depend on scholars who are reputed to be experts in the history of some particular region or culture and whose summaries and interpretations of data may not be endorsed by contemporaries of equal reputation in the same field, so that, as often as not, a man must acquire a very considerable knowledge of each subject before he can decide whose authority is to be trusted, even provisionally. Furthermore, in many areas of history and pre-history our knowledge is so fragmentary that the conclusions generally accepted today may become obsolete tomorrow as the result of some new discovery (as, for example, the discovery that solar radiation has fluctuated even so recently as during the past ten thousand years, which made it necessary to calibrate chronological determinations made from the radioactive isotope of carbon) or even detection of the spuriousness of evidence previously accepted (as in the example from The Enemy of Europe that I shall mention below). (8)
(8. Although it is not strictly relevant to a judgment of his work, we may, as a matter of human interest, remember that Yockey was an astonishingly young man, only thirty years old, when he settled down in Ireland to write Imperium, and only twenty-four when his studies were interrupted and he was hauled into the Army for service in Roosevelt’s War. When we consider the brilliance Yockey exhibited in his youth, we can only wonder what his incisive and versatile mind would have accomplished, had he lived in a happier age and been able to complete the long study and meditation requisite for the great intellectual task before him. We need not add that when he wrote in a hamlet on the lonely coast of the Irish Sea south of Dublin and Wicklow, he probably did not have at his disposal even the basic reference works that every serious writer keeps on his desk.)
When I reviewed the American edition of Imperium in 1963, I called attention to a startling slip of memory. Yockey says (p. 288):
‘When Charles of Anjou beheaded Conradin, the last Hohenstaufen Emperor, in 1267 [October 1268], Germany disappeared from Western history, as a unit of political significance, for 500 years…. During these centuries, the high history of Europe was made by other powers mostly with their own blood. This meant that–in comparison with the vast expenditure of blood over the generations of the others–Germany was spared.’
Yockey, writing from memory (hence the trivial error in the date) and perceiving the significance of the eclipse of the Holy Roman Empire as a European power, made a sweeping generalization, forgetting at the moment the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), in which, according to the best estimates of cautious historians, two-thirds of the population of Germany perished and much of the country was made a waste land over which Protestants and Catholics fought, each to exterminate the other for the glory of God and the profit of the Jews.
The Enemy of Europe contains (p. 80) a compound error that is both obvious and an excellent illustration of what I have said above.
‘In the 16th century B.C., Northern [nordische] barbarians invaded the Egyptians culture-petrifact, to enact the chapter of history that is called the “Hyksos” era.’
Aside from the superficial reference to Egyptian culture as petrified, which could be defended only with reference to a much later period in Egypt’s history, there are two errors. The first of these is clearly a slip of Yockey’s memory: he has confused the successive invasions of Egypt in the thirteenth century B.C. by the “Peoples of the Sea,” who were predominantly Nordic (and who were defeated and expelled, finally by Ramses III in the following century), with the earlier take-over of Egypt in the seventeenth century (9) by the “Hyksos,” who were predominantly Semitic–a confusion facilitated by the speculations of some historians who tried to reconcile conflicting evidence by postulating that the “Hyksos” were the Hittites, who were classified as Aryan (10) because they were ruled by an aristocracy (which evidently came from the east to invade and conquer the country) and their official language was based on Indo-European.
(9. Yockey’s reference to the sixteenth century B.C. is to the recovery of Egyptian independence. The rule of the “Hyksos” lasted for a little more than a century. The dates here are fairly secure, although chronological precision in Egyptian history can be attained with certainty only with the Eighteenth Dynasty.)
(10. The word ‘Aryan’ is commonly avoided these days by writers who fear that the Jews will punish them for using it, but we do need a specific designation for our race and one that will permit us to restrict ‘Indo-European’ to use as a linguistic term, since, as everyone knows, race and language are quite different things, and language is not an indication of race or even nationality. (Jews are not Germans because many of them speak Yiddish, which is basically a corruption of a low dialect of German, and the Congoids residing in the United States are not Anglo-Saxon because their only language is a debased English.) The great pioneer in social anthropology, Vacher de Lapouge, would have us restrict the term ‘Aryan’ historically to the division of our race that conquered India and Persia and sooner or later destroyed itself by miscegenation with the aborigines they had subdued. (One has only to think of the mongrel population of modern Iran, of which the name, derived from arya through the Zend Airyana, means ‘land of the Aryans’!) He would have us use the Linnaean biological classification, Homo Europaeus and Homo Alpinus, which correspond to ‘Nordic’ and ‘Alpine’ in the more common terminology; but the awkwardness of those terms is obvious. The Sanskrit arya is not only the designation by which conquerors of India and Persia identified themselves, but also a word meaning ‘noble,’ which designates the qualities of heroism, chivalry, and magnanimity for which our race has always had a characteristic and distinctive admiration, and is therefore better than any neologism we might devise. So long as we intend to consider objectively the phenomena of the real world, we should not be deterred by the threats of our biological enemies nor yet by the yapping of trained witlings of our own race.)
The second error in that statement was not an error in 1948 in the sense that Yockey’s assumption that the “Hyksos” conquered Egypt could have been supported by references to the works of some of the most distinguished Egyptologists of the time, although grave misgivings about the supposed conquest had been accumulating since 1892 (and perhaps earlier), as the discrepancies between the one long-known account (the late Egyptian historian, Manetho, as quoted and interpreted by Josephus) on the one hand and the Egyptian inscriptions and the archaeological evidence on the other became ever more glaring. It is now established that there was no conquest by force of arms–no sudden invasion by barbarians of any race. (11) What happened was that Asiatics, (12) most or all of whom bore Semitic names and came from the region in Asia Minor that is now called Palestine, by gradual immigration across the Sinai peninsula infiltrated Egypt and used, consciously or instinctively, the techniques of subversion, inciting or exacerbating class-warfare, regional differences, and the greed or ambition of discontented Egyptians until the nation was reduced to a revolutionary chaos, fragmented under numerous local rulers, many of whom were native Egyptian puppets, and then again consolidated under Semitic overlords to whom the various provinces paid tribute. The Asiatics ruled Egypt for more than a century until a native tributary dared to revolt, and the Egyptians called their Semitic masters, whom many Egyptians revered willingly and for profit, their ‘alien rulers’–in the modern transliteration of hieroglyphics, which ignores unwritten vowels, the ________ [unable to render–Ed.] whence the long-misunderstood term ‘Hyksos.’ So much is now certain, although many details remain obscure, and we note the irony that Yockey, by a few years, missed an historical determination that would have been of the utmost value in the formulation of his own theory–the first clear example of conquest by immigration and subversion. (13)
(11. The facts, so far as they have now been ascertained, are well presented by Professor John Van Seter’s The Hyksos, Yale University Press, 1966. Although the crucial data come from an Egyptian stele found in 1954 and a papyrus that was first published in the following year, the evidence from archaeological and epigraphical sources had been accumulating for the better part of a century, but a clear understanding of what is known as the Second Intermediate Period in Egyptian history was impossible so long as historians felt obligated to try to reconcile the evidence with the statements of Josephus, a Jew who wrote in the first century of our era and claimed he was quoting Manetho, a very late Egyptian priest, who wrote in Greek in the third century B.C. Josephus, who naturally wails about what his race now calls “anti-Semitism” (i.e., resistance to its covert dominion), says what he thinks will impose on the goyim and is, naturally, a forger and a liar. His statements about a military conquest of Egypt by valiant Jews must be disregarded.)
(12. The proletarian revolution is described in the Admonitions of Ipuwer, one of the best-known works of Egyptian literature, now dated to the period of social upheaval that preceded the open dominion of the “Hyksos.” We do not know how numerous those Asiatics were, nor to what extent their subversion of Egypt was carried out by a conscious and concerted plan, as distinct from instinctive parasitism. It may be significant that some of them disguised themselves under Egyptian names, much as Jews now frequently masquerade under Anglo-Saxon names (e.g., Ashley Montagu!), and that the “Hyksos,” although fanatical devotees of an Asiatic god of their own, often feigned “conversion” to the native Egyptian cults. It is thus often difficult to tell whether some of the rulers subordinate to the Asiatic overlord were Asiatics masquerading under Egyptian names or Egyptian collaborators who profited from the exploitation of their own people. The Asiatics obviously promoted a “multi-racial” society as a means of destruction and perhaps even a kind of “anti-colonialism,” since the Blacks of the Egyptian colony in Nubia became “independent,” and, indeed, the Egyptian revolt against Asiatic domination succeeded only because the “liberated” Nubians failed to follow instructions from the “Hyksos” to attack the insurgent Egyptians in the rear. The policy of mongrelization was so successful that we even hear of one of the Asiatics’ puppets, supposedly the legitimate heir of an Egyptian king, who was known as The Black. The genetic ruin of Egypt was thus begun, although Egypt, after the expulsion of “Hyksos” rulers (though many of the race doubtless remained in Egypt) knew a period of imperial greatness under the Eighteenth Dynasty until the accession in 1379 B.C. of a crazed religious fanatic, Akhenaten, who, although at least two of his grandparents were blond Aryans, was, as is obvious from his portraits, some kind of mongrel.)
(13. The Egyptians did not distinguish clearly between the various breeds of Asiatics, and therefore the available evidence does not authorize an inference that they were Jews or directed by Jews, tempting as that inference is. There is no historical identification of Jews at so early a date. Josephus tried to connect the “Hyksos” with the story of Joseph in the Old Testament (Gen. 39-50), which is, of course, just a folk-tale dated by allusions to a much later time. It is not impossible, however, that some actual events may have suggested the exemplary fiction about a Jew who got into Egypt, wormed his way to the top by adroit trickery (supposedly with the help of his tribal god), preyed on the good nature of an unnamed Egyptian king to import a swarm of his brethren, exploited the stupid king’s superstitions with oneiromancy, got control of the whole nation, and, acting in the name of his royal dupe, cornered all the food and all the money in Egypt (see especially 47.14-21), and then starved the stupid goyim until they had to barter their cattle and their land for food and finally sell themselves into slavery, after which the wily Jew herded his biped cattle from their homes to other parts of the country to destroy what sense of community his slaves might have with their former neighbors.)
A philosophy of history is not invalidated by such oversights, any more than Copernican astronomy was invalidated by its author’s inadequate and largely erroneous knowledge of planetary orbits.
The analogy incidentally reminds us that the English word most commonly applied to efforts to formulate laws of history, historionomy, is misleading, since it suggests a possibility of determinations and predictions as precise and certain as in astronomy. That is manifestly absurd, and the French term, metahistoire, with its implied analogy to the notoriously speculative and vaporous doctrines of metaphysics, is preferable, although it may conversely exaggerate the degree of uncertainty and insubstantiality. Whatever the name given to this comparatively new domain of inquiry, (14) it must be regarded as a philosophy, not as a science in the strict sense of that word. There is therefore a great difference between philosophical theory and practical perception of contemporary realities, although the two are combined in the work of every writer on the subject. The theory is neither strengthened nor impaired by the accompanying view of contemporary events.
(14. For all practical purposes, it may be said to begin with Theodore Funck-Brentano’s La civilisation et ses lois, published in 1876. The study is now obsolete but should not be forgotten. Its author saw clearly the absurdity of many contemporary fictions, such as the notion that there are “human rights” (which is still used to make bird-brains cackle), and understood that nations inevitably rot when they fall under the dominace of peace-lubbers; and he even foresaw the extension of Russian power over the more civilized nations of Europe.)
The still great prestige of Spengler today does not depend on the morphology of history that he elaborated in The Decline of the West, for while it would be premature to make a final judgment before 2000 or even 2100, it is apparent that the course of our own civilization has drastically departed from what his theory predicted. (14a) Indeed, unless there is a total and epochal reversal of present tendencies in the next two decades, it will be possible to reconcile the facts to his theory only by claiming that Faustian civilization was, like the Inca culture of Peru, cut off and destroyed before it reached maturity–a claim excluded by Spengler’s own analysis of historical forces. For the time being, at least, the Spenglerian theory seems to have been fallacious and to be memorable only as a vast intellectual construction, comparable to Kant’s philosophy, respectable as a monument of intellectual power, though mistaken in its conclusions, and as prime datum concerning the historical period in which it was constructed. But even if we flatly reject Spengler’s historionomy, we must nevertheless acknowledge and admire the sagacity of a mind that perceived contemporary realities much more clearly than did the reputedly wisest of his contemporaries, as is evidenced by numerous observations made obiter in his major work (15) and, above all, by The Hour of Decision, in which he, in 1932, saw, with a clarity and accuracy that is now indubitable, the grim realities of the world at that time and the imminent dangers to our civilization of which virtually no one was then aware. The essential accuracy of his prevision is made obvious by the disasters that have fallen so terribly upon us. (16)
(14a. Spengler’s historionomy, as expounded in his major works and, indeed, everything that he published before his death in 1936, predicted that, as an ineluctable historical necessity, the coming war would be fought for hegemony of the west, and the many highly intelligent men who were convinced by his analysis confidently expected that that war would decide which nation of our civilization would become the analogue of Rome in the Classical world. When the war occurred, however, it was fought for the Suicide of the West as a necessary preliminary to realization of the Jews’ millennial dream of subjugating the entire world. In no published work did Spengler show the slightest awareness of the terrible power of the international race or anticipate the now unconcealed Jewish domination under which the West is being driven to the precipice over which nations and races disappear from history. Some of his admirers today point out that he did not overlook the power of the great predators of international finance, some of whom are Aryans who have assimilated Jewish attitudes toward their own race, but in 1921 he assured his contemporaries that they were living at “the moment when money is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarism that is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step” (Vol. II, p. 507). Today, more than half a century later, is there any indication that “Caesar’s legions are returning to consciousness”? The present is obviously the result of forces that Spengler ignored, and whatever our problematic future may hold, events have shown that his “morphology of history” was, at least, radically defective. (Cf. pp. 23 ff. below.))
(16. The Hour of Decision is incomplete, and Spengler’s understanding may have been more comprehensive than we now know. An unpleasant aspect of the Hitlerian regime was an atmosphere, perhaps inevitable in all mass movements, that prevented Spengler from publishing, and perhaps from writing, the projected second volume. There was no official hostility toward him, and his books remained in print constantly until the Jewish conquest in 1945, but an English reader can sufficiently perceive the essentials of the situation from the translation of Spengler Letters, 1913-1936, selected and drastically edited by Arthur Helps (London, 1966), to pages of which my parenthetical numbers will refer. Although sales of the first volume delighted his publisher (291) and certain bookstores filled their windows with his works (285), and although he had an evidently amicable interview with Hitler (290), his book was, as he said, ” misunderstood by a section of the ruling party in Germany, and consequently attacked” (196), and, according to one of his friends, both the new book and the Untergang were attacked in an “unfounded, personally malicious, and rancorous way” by writers who were like vultures (300f.). Spengler officially protested to Dr. Goebbels the publication in one of the Party’s organs, the Kreuzzeitung, of two articles “in which I was described, among other things, as a traitor to my country. It is impossible,” he added, “to appear in public on behalf of Germany when at the same time articles of this kind appear. Personally they are a matter of indifference to me. For the last fifteen years I have endured so much abuse that I am sufficiently brazen-faced. But in regard to my efforts to work for Germany, they are a hindrance which must be got rid of” (290). Dr. Goebbels was apparently unable to suppress the attacks, which continued. There were rumors that he was an opponent of the r‚gime (304) and unverifiable reports that the r‚gime was opposed to him (297,308), and although the second volume was “anxiously awaited” (301, 308), it never appeared, and Spengler devoted his remaining years to studies in ancient history. That he wrote no more of the Hour of Decision than the published volume seems unlikely, but we cannot go beyond the affirmation of his niece and literary executrix, Dr. Hildegarde Kornhardt, that no part of a second volume was found among the Nachlaá after his death.)
The theory of history that Yockey elaborated in Imperium, which is essentially a revision of Spengler in the light of subsequent events and his own reading and observations, is separable from his estimate of the world situation, and it is not impossible that his reputation in our problematical future will depend more on The Enemy of Europe that on his major work.
Although The Enemy of Europe is formally presented as a pendent to Imperium, we must be certain that Yockey’s perception of the present was not deduced from historical theory. He was a man of acute and discerning mind, as he proved in an article published in 1939, when he was twenty-one. (17) At that early age he saw much that was hidden from virtually all of his contemporaries, however experienced or learned they were. He perceived that the so-called “Economic Depression,” which so effectively scared the American and made them docile, had been contrived by our enemies by use of the Federal Reserve System, which had been foisted on this nation in a campaign engineered by a Warburg, imported from Germany in 1902, while his kin remained at home to ensure the defeat of that nation in the European war that began, no doubt on schedule, in 1914. He foresaw–and this, mind you, before hostilities began in Europe in 1939–that the “Depression,” which was being cunningly prolonged to subjugate the American people, “break their spirits,” and “make the greatest possible number dependent on the Government,” would culminate in a planned war in which “American youth by the millions will be conscripted into armies to be sent to Asia and Europe to fight the battle of world Communism.” (That, remember, was two and one-third years before our great War Criminal was able to stampede American cattle into the war that he and his masters had instigated in Europe.) Yockey understood–as many individuals do not, even today–that the gradual imposition of Communist slavery on the Americans began when Warburg, Baruch, and other Jewish herdsmen cozened the boobs into thrusting their necks into the yoke of the White Slave Act, officially called the Sixteenth Amendment, which imposed the admittedly Marxist device of an income tax. He perceived, as did few men of supposed financial acumen, that the bonds issued by the alien government in Washington were fraudulent and would never be redeemed for their face value in real money, although their owners might be given some counterfeit currency printed by the Treasury in Washington and progressively depreciated. And he also perceived that virtually the whole of the educational system had come under the control of typical American “educators” and “intellectuals,” who will say anything for a fast buck, while the press, including both most of the newspapers and the popular periodicals, was even more directly controlled and often owned by the aliens, who were using it to defile and pervert the minds of the young and prepare them for use as expendable animals abroad or as obedient zombies at home.
(17. “The Tragedy of Youth” appeared, under the date of 21 August 1939, in Social Justice, a weekly periodical that was published by a Catholic ecclesiastic, Father Charles Coughlin, until the Jews bribed or frightened his venal superiors in the Church to suppress a publication that was making some of the serfs discontented. In the article, Yockey uses such terms as “a conservative, Christian view of life,” perhaps as a courtesy to the editor. The term ‘Christian’ at that time and for decades thereafter was a convenient designation for the established traditions of our civilization as distinct from Jewish influences, which the word was thought to exclude, and it carried no necessary implication of religious beliefs.)
All that is obvious now–except to the verbosely “intellectual” parrots who learn from the New York Times and its subsidiaries what line of chatter will keep them fashionable and hopeful aspirants to bakhshish from their masters–but if we can recapture in our minds the climate of opinion when he wrote, we cannot but be mightily impressed by the perspicacity of an adolescent of twenty-one. I will frankly admit that in the summer of 1939, although I was older than Yockey and had carried my studies into many areas of human history that he never had the leisure to investigate, and although I had no illusions about the fetid mass of traitors, enemy aliens, and looters in Washington, I grossly underestimated the power and even the racial solidarity of the Jews. And I knew of no one who estimate our plight more accurately. Had I read Yockey’s article when it was published, I should have dismissed it as an alarmed apprehension of unlikely future contingencies rather than a description of what had already happened.
For the acuity of perception that he then evinced, Yockey had no need of an historical theory. But since The Enemy of Europe is written in terms of history, it will be necessary briefly to examine that philosophical structure.
Imperium, as I have said, is based on The Decline of the West. In large part, its premises are Spengler’s conclusions. A critique of the philosophy of history that the two works have in common would require a large tome; it will suffice here to indicate some considerations that are crucial to an estimate of it.
That history is cyclical in the sense that nations and empires rise and fall by some strange fatality in constant succession, has been a commonplace since the first rational study of human societies and was specifically stated by Herodotus. The opinion that the fatality is quasi-biological–that civilized societies are themselves organisms that necessarily pass through the life-cycle of all living things, being born, growing to maturity, and ineluctably progressing to senility and death–is doubtless much older than the elder Seneca, to whom we owe the first clear statement of it. (18)
That the several human species have produced more than one civilization is indubitable. There have been numerous organized and powerful societies (e.g., the Huns) that we may classify as barbarous rather than civilized, but, no matter how strict our standards, we must at least recognize the cultures of Sumeria-Babylonia, Egypt, China, and India as civilizations in the full sense of that word, and also as civilizations separated from our own by an impassable abyss: we can observe their deeds, so far as the facts can be ascertained from written records or by archaeological research, and we can read what is preserved of their literatures, but we must observe those peoples from the outside, and the greater our knowledge of their cultures, the greater our awareness that we are studying the operation of minds and instincts fundamentally different from our own. (19) To be sure, we can observe their behavior and even account for it, as, mutatis mutandis, we study the behavior of elephants or baboons, but we can no more establish a rapport with the inner consciousness of those people than we can with the consciousness of the animals, except by such a flight of sentimental imagination as enabled James Oliver Curwood to report so vividly the thoughts of wolves.
(19. For a clear distinction between two kinds of mentality, each of which is fundamentally incomprehensible to the other, see the epochal work of Professor William S. Haas, The Destiny of the Mind, East and West, New York, 1956. See also the socio-psychological study by Géryke Young, Two Worlds, Not One, London, 1969. The identification of two virtually antithetical types of mentality does not, of course, mean that there may not be other types, as numerous as civilizations or even more numerous. When we imagine that the minds of other races work in the same way as ours, we merely delude ourselves dangerously.)
Spengler identifies as two entirely separate and discrete civilizations the Classical (“Apollonian”), c. 1100 B.C.–A.D. 300, and the Western (“Faustian”), c. A.D. 900–2200. These are the two for which we have the fullest information, and between them Spengler establishes some of his most brilliant synchronisms (e.g., Alexander the Great corresponds to Napoleon). Even a century ago, this dichotomy would have seemed almost mad, for everyone knew and took for granted that whatever might be true of alien cultures, our own was a continuation, or, at least, revival of the Classical. Spengler’s denial of that continuity was the most radical and startling aspect of his historical synthesis, but so great has been his overshadowing influence that it has been accepted by a majority of the many subsequent writers on the philosophy of history, of whom we may mention here only Toynbee, Raven, Bagby, and Brown. (20) The Classical, we are told, was a civilization like the Egyptian, now dead and gone and with no organic connection with our own.
(20. Everyone knows the great work of Toynbee, A Study of History, and I trust that I need not again point out that the twelve volumes contain two distinguishable conceptions of the historical process, since the conceptions on which were based the first four volumes become uncertain and fluctuating in the fifth, after which his consideration of history takes a new direction, practically at right angles to the earlier one. The other works that I have cited here are less well known: Alexander Raven, Civilisation as Divine Superman, London, 1932; Philip Bagby, Culture and History, London, 1958; Lawrence A. Brown, The Might of the West, New York, 1963. I list these four works as particularly significant, since each takes its departure from Spengler and moves in a different direction. All historionomic studies after Spengler are either commentaries on his work or attempts to refute it, and a bare listing of the more important would require a dozen pages or more.)
Spengler (whom Brown especially follows in this respect) supports his drastic dichotomy by impressively contrasting Graeco-Roman mathematics and technology with our own; from that contrast he deduces differences in the perception of space and time, exhibited particularly in music, and reaches the conclusion that the Classical Weltanschauung was essentially static, desiring and recognizing only a strictly delimited and familiar world, whereas ours is dynamic and exhibits a passionate yearning for the infinite and the unknown. One can advance various objections to the generalizations I have so curtly and inadequately summarized (e.g., is the difference in outlook really greater than that between the “classical” literature of Eighteenth-Century Europe and the Romanticism of the following era?), but the crucial point is whether the differences, which belong to the order that we must call spiritual for want of a better term, (21) are fundamental or epiphenomenal.
(21. It should be unnecessary to state explicitly that in discussions of cultures and historical events the word ‘spiritual’ is used to designate the determinants of human conduct that lie between the strictly physiological and the strictly rational, and therefore implies no belief in immortal souls or the mythology of any religion or comparable superstition. It must always be borne in mind that the spiritual components of individuals and hence of societies are biological, transmitted genetically in human as in other mammals, whether or not the innate instincts fully emerge into consciousness, and whether or not they are somewhat modified by circumstances or education before they determine action.)
The fortunate preservation of vestiges of Classical culture during the Dark and Middle Ages may be explained in various ways, but our Western culture today is admittedly the product of the Renaissance, which was so named because it was from the first believed to be a rebirth of the Classical. In all the civilized nations of Europe the best minds of our race spontaneously turned to Graeco-Roman antiquity for models in literature, the fine arts, politics, philosophy, and the art of living, (22) and sought to model the whole of European society on the great ages of Greece and Rome, so far as that was feasible without inciting the revolutionary violence of mass movements, which they instinctively feared. What is most significant is that their admiration and emulation was not indiscriminately directed toward the whole of the Classical in Spengler’s loose use of that word as a synonym for the whole of Graeco-Roman history, but exclusively to the chronologically small part of that history which they esteemed as classical in the strict sense which they gave to that word: essentially the flowering of Athens in Greece, and of Rome in the last centuries of the Republic and the Augustan period, i.e., the periods in which the strictly pagan civilization of antiquity reached its apogee. For the great heaps of theological trash accumulated in both Greek and Latin before the fall of the Roman Empire, they had no real respect, and they likewise rejected the non-Christian works of the long decadence of the Roman Empire, except insofar as those ages of dwindling intelligence preserved fragments of, or information about, the great eras. In other words, the best minds of the Renaissance rejected the ages of Greek and Roman history in which the populations were mongrelized and the culture contaminated by the Orientals who became its representatives–and this rejection was an instinctive aversion, for I have found no indication that any scholar of the Renaissance was aware of the racial mutation in the populations of antiquity.
(22. Discussion of, and disputes about, the Renaissance are innumerable. For a fair evaluation, see R.R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage, Cambridge, 1954. All recent discussions of the era take their departure from Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), which is of great value, although it has been furiously criticized, especially by persons with ecclesiastical interests. (There are several English translations; Middlemore’s, the only one I have spot-checked, is quite good.) Much of the tedious disputaillerie about the Renaissance could be avoided if it were remembered that most of the major Humanists held important positions in the Church or some government and therefore had to deal professionally with such matters as ecclesiastical politics and doctrines, whatever they privately believed, and also that they formed an intellectual aristocracy, had no concern for hoi polloi (however incomprehensible that may be to persons imbued with the mysticism about “democracy” that is in fashion at present) and, quite apart from considerations of prudence, had no wish to stir up the superstitions and blind emotions of the masses.)
So strong was this spontaneous esteem for the great ages of pagan antiquity that it prevailed over the opposition of both Church and secular rulers. The more alert ecclesiastics did not fail to perceive that the rebirth of pagan antiquity was bad for their business, but the wiser ones perceived that the intellectual enthusiasm could not be successfully repressed and elected to join what they could not defeat. Many rulers of the time were doubtless embarrassed. We can imagine the sentiments of the first Sforza, a peasant become a duke, as he watched comedies performed in Latin and pretended to appreciate humor that depended on linguistic subtleties. We owe a good phrase to the first James of England, who warned his sons that base-born men might speak better Latin, but no one could criticize the King’s English. He thus differed from Lord Chesterfield, who complacently remarked to his son that gentlemen are apt to speak better Latin than professional scholars, for gentlemen study only the real classics, whereas the scholars must read large quantities of decadent stuff in search of historical information. So great, you see, was the attraction of the true classics, so great was the affinity that our race instinctively felt for the great ages of Antiquity, that for five centuries the greater part of the youth of all educated men was devoted to mastering the modalities of ancient thought so completely that they could write Latin verse and prose of classical purity and often Greek with equal facility and classical accuracy.
This devotion to the great ages of Greece and Rome produced, in spite of economic and religious considerations, a stupendous educational effort that is without precedent or parallel in the accumulated history of mankind, (23) and ended only with the fissuring of our civilization by recrudescent barbarism and cultural sabotage. All this, Spengler and Yockey would have us dismiss as “pseudo-morphosis,” as a young civilization’s respect for a predecessor–in sum, as an hallucination–an hallucination, furthermore, of an intensity and persistence that makes unique our civilization, no matter how it is explained.
(23. It must, of course, be distinguished from such entirely different phenomena as the preservation of a sacred language (e.g. Sanskrit in India, Hebrew in Jewry), the study of a contemporary foreign language (e.g. an educated Roman’s knowledge of Greek or an educated Englishman’s knowledge of French), religious interest in foreign heiratic texts (e.g. the study of Pali by some Chinese Buddhists and of Hebrew by European Protestants), and the influence of exotic literature and thought, usually through translations (e.g. the great influence of Greek philosophy on the Islamic falasifa or the influence of Russian novelists on English writers).)
Spengler and Brown particularly insist on the deficiencies of ancient mathematics, which they both exaggerate, (24) but if there is a dominant characteristic of our civilization, it is the capacity (in good minds) for rigorously objective observation of nature and strictly rational inferences and deductions therefrom–the mentality that has made possible our science and technology. This is the type of mentality that Professor Haas, whom I mentioned above, calls ‘philosophical’ to distinguish it from other types, and if we look through recorded history and insist on something more than the invention of simple devices, such as wheels or bows and arrows or permanent buildings, we find the first manifestation of this mentality in the Ionian philosophers, who sought to explain the universe without invoking magic and a mythology about praeterhuman beings. That is the real substance of Graeco-Roman philosophy, and we should take especial notice of the New Academy, from which comes the basic method of modern science, which depends on a nice calculation of probabilities. If we look for this rational view of the world in other civilizations, we find no trace of it in the Egyptian or the Sumerian-Babylonian, for in both of these, so far as we know, the world was always thought of as the work of gods and its phenomena attributed to magic, not to the regularity of natural laws. In the Arabian (“Magian”) civilization, we find only a few individuals, such as Averroes and Ibn Khaldn, who, on the basis of a knowledge of Aristotle and other Greek authors, rise above the gross superstitions of Islam and appear as mere eccentrics in a culture on which they had no influence, and we have only to read them to see how far their mentality differs from the objective use of reason that distinguishes what we may, with Haas, call the philosophical mind. In India, we find the Lok yata, of which we know through scattered references in extant literature, but this rationalism seems to have flourished only briefly and during the period before Aryan dominance was seriously threatened, after which the ‘philousian’ mentality so prevailed in the conglomerate population of India that the Hindus provide Haas with his neatest example of it, and faith in the supernatural made the physical world seem nugatory and even illusory. In China, although the nocturnes of Confucius and Mencius are relatively free of gross superstition, and the Fa Chia, a pragmatism confined to a ruling ‚lite, considered society in implacably realistic terms, there is no evidence of a truly philosophical attempt to ascertain the laws of nature. We find, therefore, in our civilization a type of mentality paralleled only in Graeco-Roman antiquity, where, significantly, it is the mentality of men of our race.
(24. Greek mathematics (of which a convenient conspectus may be found in B.L. van der Waerden’s Science Awakening, New York, 1963) sufficed to produce the machine for calculating planetary motions, often called a computer, that was found in the wreckage of an ancient ship off Anticythera, and of which everyone now knows, thanks to the scribblers of wonder-books, who think it helps them prove that the earth was colonized by “astronauts.” On the mathematics requisite for the construction of ancient artillery and the calculation of trajectories, see the article by Werner Soedel and Vernard Foley in the Scientific American, CCXL, 3 (March 1979), pp. 150–160.)
The cardinal flaw in the historical theories of Spengler and Yockey is an almost perverse equivocation about the biological reality of race. Both strive to make race more or less independent of genetics, although they do not go so far as does Alexander Raven, who would reduce civilization to a “super-organic” idea. In The Enemy of Europe (p. 43), Yockey insists that “the idea of vertical [= linear, i.e., hereditary] race is dead…. The race one feels in oneself is everything, the anatomico-geographic group whence one comes means nothing,” and he even deplores the racial policy of the National Socialist regime as “an enormous tragedy.” (25) It is true that Yockey, following Spengler, had the strange notion that the physical characteristics of race, such as the cephalic index, were determined by the landscape and soil, not be genes, in proof whereof “long-headed Jews from Sicily, and short-headed ones from Germany, produced offspring with the same average head measurement, the specifically American one.” (26) Spengler was taken in by some of the propaganda for an American “melting pot” and especially by the hoax contrived by Franz Boas, a twisted little Jew, who popped into the United States, was, for undisclosed reasons, made Professor of Anthropology in Columbia University, and founded a school of fiction-writing called “social anthropology,” (27) It is also true that Spengler and Yockey, unlike Raven, do not categorically deny that race in the accepted meaning of that word does determine the outlook of a people and hence the quality of their civilization, but they create some confusion by using ‘race’ and ‘thoroughbred’ to designate a high degree of excellence in individuals who, it seems, are largely the product of the soil of the region in which they reside. They simply ignore the vast amount of scientific evidence that the potentiality of every individual is unalterably determined by his heredity, although obviously his development will be affected by nutrition and other environmental factors and, of course, by sheer accident, which may terminate his life at any stage.
(25. One hears that Yockey’s opinion may have been determined by awareness of his mixed Irish and Spanish ancestry, but such speculations are nugatory. A novelist can know all the inner thoughts and motivations of his characters, but when we deal with living persons, the motives of their actions are usually obvious, but an attempt to ascertain by psychological analysis the source of rationally expressed opinions will usually end in a quagmire of subtle hypotheses. If it can be shown that Yockey was in fact embarrassed by his ancestry, it will be necessary to determine the percentage of influence to be assigned to that sentiment and also to (a) the authority of Spengler, (b) the political doctrine of Moeller, whom I shall mention in the next note, or any one of a score of writers connected with the National Socialist movement, (c) one or more of a hundred other books touching on this subject that Yockey may have read, (d) what he was taught in his youth and took for granted, (e) lectures that he may have heard at some time, (f) conversations with one or more respected friends, (g) veneration for writers of genius, such as Spengler and Montaigne, whose ancestry was to some extent tainted, (h) affection for respected friends of comparable ancestry, (i) consideration of the practical political problem I shall mention in the next note, (j) fear lest a scientific ethnology, recognizing a multiplicity of sub-races, would produce a hopeless multiplicity of subdivisions of the population, comparable to the jungle of sub-castes in India, as was, for example, predicted by Dr. Guido Landra when he attacked the basic National Socialist conception of race in his lectures in the University of Berlin in 1939, where, under Hitler, he enjoyed a freedom of speech that is denied to American biologists, even at Yale and Harvard, which were once respectable universities, (k) a publicist’s desire to minimize potential obstacles to the European unity he wanted to promote, and (l) other possible influences that do not occur to my mind at the moment of writing.)
(26. Imperium, p. 275; the information comes from The Decline of the West, Vol. II, p. 119. Spengler’s belief that such spurious (and inherently preposterous) data had been empirically verified was probably crucial in his thought, but there were many other influences, particularly the doctrine that a man may belong “spiritually” to a race or sub-race to which he does not belong biologically–a belief held by many of his contemporaries, notable Moeller, whose Das Dritte Reich (Hamburg, 1923) was a major source of National Socialism; see also H.-J. Schwierskott, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck und der revolution„re Nationalismus in der Weimarer Republic (Gottingen, 1962). The urge to minimize or conceal biological and even cultural differences is related to the practical problem that has confronted every ruler and statesman since Sumerian times: the need to create a state (which is necessarily territorial) by inducing some cohesive unity among the more or less diverse peoples who are residing in that territory at the time and whom it is not expedient to expel. This was an acute problem throughout Europe, including Germany, where the proverbial differences in temperament between the typical Prussian and the typical Bavarian could seem as great as a difference between major races to a population that had, for the most part, little contact with non-Aryan races except the chameleon-like Jews with their racial ability to simulate the manners of other races when it is profitable to do so.)
(27. A typical example is a “study” concocted by one of Boas’s creations, Dr. Ruth Benedict, whose Patterns of Culture (1934) purported to contain an “anthropological investigation” of the Zuni Indians, who were a model of the perfect society, uncompetitive, deeply religious, peace-loving, totally egalitarian, sexually adjusted, etc. — all this put out as an object-lesson for the vile white Americans, whose vices deprived them of such bliss. Gullible Americans put their common sense in cold storage when they saw that the preposterous tale was told by a Ph.D. from Columbia and labeled “scientific.” Virtually every significant statement in the book was found to be false by responsible investigators who actually observed the Zuni (Esther Goldfrank, Florence Hawley Ellis, J.M. Roberts, William Smith, Li An-che, Philipp Farb, et al.), although they politely pretended to believe that Mrs. Benedict, Ph.D., did “inadequate field work,” i.e., that she would have told the truth, had she not been incompetent, feckless, and irresponsible. I need not say that Patterns of Culture was cunningly adjusted to the opinions and superstitions prevalent in the 1930s and designed to benumb the minds of its readers.)
This attempt to minimize the biological nature of men is paradoxical in writers who not only recognize that the greater part of human conduct is determined by instincts and tropisms that are largely subconscious, but so restrict the function of reason as to make it virtually without effect on the course of history. We are told–and the proposition is illustrated by examples drawn from the history of our race–that great men, who determine events rather that chatter or write about them, have a ‘tact’ or instinct that enables them to make correct decisions with so little reliance on their rational powers that they may not know why they took the action that made them victorious or successful in a given undertaking. Their strength comes, not from superior powers of cognition and cogitation, but from a faith in their own destiny. The psychological problem cannot be analyzed here, (28) but if we accept the claim that even the greatest men are basically irrational, we thereby attribute to heredity an absolute power over human conduct, of which it becomes the sole determinant, since it is beyond question that in all mammals, including men, instincts are innate and genetically transmitted. The logical conclusion to be drawn from Spengler’s psychology, therefore, is that biological race is supremely important. Granting that “the race one feels in oneself” is what counts, what one feels (as distinct from what one may simulate) is genetically determined.
(28. A good example may be seen in generals who are credited with genius, such as Napoleon and George Patton, who seem to make strategic and tactical decisions by some instinctive feeling for the situation and to take risks that make their staffs turn pale, but are victorious because they either sensed or calculated the enemy’s reactions more accurately than their subordinates. Before we assume that such men act by a super-rational instinct, we must be certain that what is involved is not a phenomenal power to solve extremely complex problems quickly–a power comparable in its way to the mental operations of a “lightning calculator,” who performs complex arithmetical and mathematical calculations with an ease and rapidly that startle us, but who certainly does not know the answer by instinct. Hitler’s decision to send troops into the Rhineland in 1936 over the protests of all his diplomats and generals, who predicted certain disaster, was once regarded as a proof of mystically intuitive powers, but we can now see that he estimated the political situation in France more accurately than his experts. Even so shrewd a psychologist as Jung was deceived by what was probably a strictly rational operation by an extraordinarily lucid mind.)
Yockey’s denunciation of “materialistic race-thinking” does have some basis in the lamentably elementary state of our present knowledge of racial genetics, which may be compared to the state of chemical science at the death of Lavoisier. The natural laws that determine the inheritance of physiological characteristics, such as color of eyes or olfactory sensitivity, are fairly well ascertained, but we are far from being able to identify racial genotypes. The problem is of enormous complexity, and is further complicated by the migratory and adventurous proclivities of our own race. Everyone knows, for example, that the Chinese are Mongolians, but few know that even as relatively late as the Fourth Century there was at least one Chinese Emperor (Ming) who was evidently a Nordic, having blue eyes, blond hair, and a flowing yellow beard. Even these distinctive traits are not necessarily united–everyone has seen persons with blue eyes and black hair, for example–and no one should be astonished that we find in China portraits of men in whom “the flat face is Mongoloid, but the wide open eyes are Europoid.” (29) There are many hybrids and racial traits often inextricable confused–a fact which greatly impresses thoughtless “intellectuals,” who, if they had lived in the time of Lavoisier, would doubtless have clamored for legislation to forbid discrimination on the grounds that the four recognized elements, earth, air, fire, and water, are not found in a pure state, whence it follows that it is wicked to recognize differences between them and to bathe in water rather than in mud or a bonfire.
Although we can, within limits, determine the transmission and inheritance of physical traits, and although we know that intellectual capacity, as shown by intelligence tests, is genetically determined, we know virtually nothing about the biological mechanism that transmit the almost infinitely complex elements of human consciousness and subconscious being. In certain instances, at least, the psychic elements may be independent of the strictly physiological. No anthropologist or geneticist can explain the fact that there are Jews, members of Yahweh’s Master Race, who exhibit the physical characteristics of other races. The Jews in China, for example, seem to Western eyes, at least, indistinguishable from the Mongolians among whom they reside, although they are spiritually and mentally full members of the Self-Chosen People. We must assume that the Jews, who have preserved their racial identity and cohesion through so many centuries, have an empirical knowledge of genetics much greater than our own, but our knowledge is so limited that we can neither confirm nor disprove Dr. Alfred Nossig’s terrifying boast, “A single little drop of Jewish blood influences the mentality of entire families, even through a long series of generations.” (30)
(30. Although Nossig’s Intergrales Judentum was published simultaneously in Vienna, Berlin, and New York in 1922, it is now extremely rare and has never been translated into English. Nossig gives his fellow Jews eminently practical advice on the ways by which they can most expeditiously attain the goal and purpose which, as he says, is implicit in the teachings of Moses, i.e., the formation of One World under their dominion. Recognizing that his race controls both Capitalism and Socialism, he calls for a coördinated application of both forces to put the goyim in their place–which, of course, will be good for the stupid animals, if they are docile. The statement I have translated occurs on p. 76, where Dr. Nossig goes on to claim that the “drop” of Jewish heredity, once implanted in an ancestor, will affect the brain cells (Gehirnganglien) of his descendants through many subsequent generations and thus make them susceptible to Jewish ideas of internationalism and One World. Persons of that infected heredity, therefore, are goyim who can readily be mobilized as auxiliaries and used to subjugate their own race and the entire globe to its destined Masers. Horresco referens.
There is one great difference between Spengler’s concept of race and Yockey’s. Although Spengler recognizes the Jews as a Magian people imbued with a Magian world-outlook and so instinctively different from us (and therefore at the limit incomprehensible to us), and although he knows that this alien body, this international nation, is today, as it was for centuries before the Christian Era, lodged in all the nations of the world that it can profitably exploit, he regards the natural antagonism between Jews and their hosts as basically not determined by biological race, but rather by the phase of civilization, the Jews representing a Magian culture that is much older than ours and now petrified. (Hence, of course, Toynbee’s description of the Jews as a “fossil people,” despite the absurdity of applying such a phrase to a species that is so active and powerful and, quite possibly, has a vitality much greater than our own.) Spengler asked his readers to believe that the Jews are a dwindling and disintegrating people, a negligible force in world politics and the struggle for power. I have always thought the Jews’ aspersions of Spengler’s memory a good example of their habitual ingratitude toward their most effective apologists.
Yockey, educated by events that Spengler did not live to see, regards the Jews as the dominant force in the world of 1952. He has very little to say, however, about their unvarying activity through all the centuries since they first appear in history, and he focuses his attention entirely on the present. We must therefore postpone consideration of it to a later section, and conclude our discussion of historical theory with notice of one crucial deficiency in both writers.