blackisthelight

With this project I am taking a very expansive view of ‘Ireland’ to include not only people from the island and events that happened here, but also the Irish abroad, the Irish diaspora and connected events. This article concerns a post war fascist intellectual with a tangential connection to Ireland. With the end of the Second World War, there was no hiding place for the consequences of antisemitic behaviour. Millions of Jews had been systematically murdered in the death camps of the Holocaust, extensively documented by Nazi paperwork and thousands of survivors and eyewitnesses. The world collectively vowed ‘Never Again’ and overt antisemitism was banished from any respectable political field, at least for a while. Unfortunately, Nazi ideology lived on after the war in the remnants of the extreme right and managed to find new adherents. Ireland, relatively unscathed by the war, and famously neutral (26 counties at least) became a haven for all sorts of people looking for somewhere to hide from the after-effects of the war.

One of the principal keepers of the flame of post-war Nazism was an American named Francis Parker Yockey. Yockey was born in Chicago in 1917 to a middle-class family with Irish and German heritage. Yockey was highly intelligent and a gifted piano player who trained as a lawyer at various colleges, graduating from Notre Dame in 1941. He became involved with fascist groups while living in Chicago in the late 1930’s including the Silver Shirts and the German-American Bund. He had an article published in Social Justice the newspaper of antisemitic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin. Chicago was a hot-spot for these groups and Yockey was drawn willingly into the milieu. Yockey became obsessed with the writing of William Spengler who theorised about the rise and fall of civilisations, comparing Western European cultures with Eastern ‘Magian’ or Jewish cultures.

Yockey enlisted in the Army after graduation and went AWOL, possibly on a mission to help Nazi spies. He was honourably discharged for mental health reasons but put on a list of suspected Nazi sympathisers. This did not appear to affect his hiring a couple of years later as a civilian prosecutor in the tribunals investigating German war crimes. Yockey was stationed in Wiesbaden but was disinterested in prosecuting Nazis, frequently helped the defendants and failed to show up to work most days. He attempted to establish contacts with former Nazis and was fired for abandonment of position. Yockey had grown to hate the United States, seeing it as destroyed and utterly corrupted by degenerate Jewish influences. In particular though, he wanted the resurrection of a pan-European fascist movement to establish a white empire to counteract modernism and ‘inferior’ cultures. The remnants of Jewish society would need to be exterminated for this to happen.

Yockey abandoned his wife and children and moved to Ireland for a period in 1947-48 where he wrote his 600 page magnum opus Imperium at a seaside inn in Brittas Bay, Co. Wicklow using the pen-name Ulick Varange. The pen name symbolised a pan-European meeting with Ireland and Rusia at either end of the imaginary empire. Yockey’s reasons for moving to Wicklow remain somewhat of a mystery. Little has been unearthed for his choosing of Ireland as his location for a writing retreat. The small coastal town wouldn’t appear to offer much in the way of research material for such a large undertaking, so perhaps it was simply the fact that Ireland was English speaking, had managed to avoided the major consequences of the war and offered somewhere quiet to concentrate. Yockey dedicated his book to ‘The hero of the Second World War’ – Adolf Hitler. He doesn’t appear to have had local connections or have left a legacy in the town apart from Imperium which he finished writing on January 30, 1948. In the book he developed his thoughts for a spiritual basis for racism, taking the works of Spengler as his main inspiration. One of the last sentences contains a geographical reference to Ireland as part of this sought after white European empire:

The soil of Europe, rendered sacred by the streams of blood which have made it spiritually fertile for a millennium, will once again stream with blood until the barbarians and distorters have been driven out and the Western banner waves on its home soil from Gibraltar to North Cape, and from the rocky promontories of Galway to the Urals.

The book contains many references to ‘culture-distorters’, a code word for Jews. The book was warmly received by many influential post-war far-right thinkers such as French Holocaust denier Maurice Bardèche, and Italian esoteric philosopher Julius Evola. It also contains some of the earliest Holocaust denial material with passages mocking the gas chambers. That Yockey wrote this after being exposed first hand to the evidence of the Holocaust shows the extent of his duplicity. Deborah Lipstadt, writing in Denying the Holocaust, said of Yockey and the book:

Twenty years prior to the formation of the IHR (Institute for Historical Review), Yockey laid out the essential elements of Holocaust denial.

After leaving Ireland Yockey worked to establish cooperation among disparate national movements and embed white European nationalism as a common cause across the continent. Yockey became somewhat of an international man of mystery and founded a group called the European Liberation Front which mirrored Oswald Mosley’s Europe – A Nation project. Yockey worked briefly at the European Contact Section for Mosley’s Union Movement, earning valuable contacts in the post-war underground. His 1949 pamphlet The Proclamation of London set out his ideas on how to build this movement, but Yockey’s intransigence was an impediment to his organising endeavours. The pair, like many egotistical activists before and since, soon fell out, with Mosley punching Yockey at an event in Hyde Park. Mosley had refused to publish or even review Imperium finding it incomprehensible. The book was published by some wealthy German contacts and has remained in print ever since.

Yockey travelled constantly through Europe, North America and the Middle East using multiple forged identities and was one of a large number of fascists (including Otto Ernst Remer and Johann von Leers) who became involved in the Egyptian government of Abdel Nasser in the 1950s. Nasser ran a cut-price Operation Paperclip and attracted a large assortment of former Nazis to work in his security and technology apparatuses. Yockey became a byword for international intrigue, attempting to associate himself with the remnants of the Nazi regime such as the Socialist Reich Party, and leading fascist figures around Europe, North America and the Middle East. He kept up with his followers by mailing out issues of a monthly newsletter called Frontfighter to subscribers. His clandestine visits to the US led to collaborations with H. Keith Thompson and Senator Joe McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare.

The anti-Americanism of Yockey’s work was based in an idea of Jewish and multiracial corruption and was strong enough that he positioned himself as a supporter of the Soviet Union. A trial he witnessed in Prague led to the execution of eleven Jews, leading Yockey to believe that Stalinism had made a decisive break with Jewish influence. Yockey’s prime political motivation seems to have been to create alliances strong enough to counter US hegemony which he saw as the principal threat to Europe. This attitude was also adopted by a few other fascist writers in the 1950s such as James Madole of the National Renaissance Party in the US.

His anti-Americanism eventually caught up with him and he was arrested by the FBI in 1960 in San Francisco. Yockey was travelling with multiple forged passports and literature he was working on, including porn that he had been writing for cash. While under arrest his only visitor was Willis Carto, a tireless white supremacist activist who became a staunch advocate of Yockey’s ideas, and reprinted Imperium in 1962 for an American audience. Carto was one of the most prominent members of the US far-right during the 60s, 70s and 80s and led the Liberty Lobby organization among other endeavours and played a huge role in the resurgence of Holocaust denial in the Anglosphere. Revilo P. Oliver, one of the founding members of the John Birch Society, a leading Holocaust denier and mentor of William Luther Pierce was also a big fan of Yockey’s work, amplifying its contents to newer generations of neo-Nazis in the US. Under investigation by the FBI who realised he was a big catch, Francis Parker Yockey killed himself with a cyanide capsule in jail before standing trial, aged 43.

Yockey’s philosophy and writings have inspired many third position movements and assorted holocaust deniers. Despite his relatively low historical profile his influence can be seen resonating to this day in fascist circles. His brief but important time in Ireland is referenced occasionally by some of the latter-day Irish far-right, particularly among the more bookish types who enjoy signalling their knowledge of obscure fascist history. His pen-name, Ulick, has been adopted by a writer at fascist rag The Burkean who engages in all sorts of bigoted propaganda and promotion of semi-obscure post-war European fascists, and Keith Woods, a nerdy Irish protégé of Richard Spencer with a relatively large audience, has made knowing references to Yockey. It is hard to quantify Yockey’s legacy, but a glowing biography from Arktos in 2018 signals that he may be more significant than usually given credit and Yockey has an audience among the more mystical end of the neo-Nazi milieu. Many rank Imperium along with Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries as the most important books in American Nazism. In many respects his writings also prefigured Aleksandr Dugin and Eurasianism although the direct influence is questionable. The Nazi movement was thoroughly discredited in the aftermath of the war and reduced to a handful of true believers, particularly in the English speaking world. Yockey was one of a few that kept the torch of hatred burning and passed it on to others who would kindle the flames brighter still.

Sources:

Atkins, Stephen E., (2009) Holocaust Denial as an International Movement Westport: Praeger

Coogan, Kevin (1999). Dreamer of the Day – Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia

Goodrich-Clark, Nicholas (2003) Black Sun – Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity New York: New York University Press

Lee, Martin A. (1997) The Beast Reawakens Boston: Little Brown

Lipstadt, Deborah (1993) Denying the Holocaust London: Penguin

Mammone, A. (2019). Transnational Neofascism in France and Italy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Mostrom, Anthony (2017) The Fascist and the Preacher: Gerald L. K. Smith and Francis Parker Yockey in Cold War–Era Los Angeles Los Angeles Review of Books, 13th May 2017

Mostrom, Anthony (2020) America’s “Mein Kampf”: Francis Parker Yockey and “Imperium” Los Angeles Review of Books, 8th August 2020