Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics
Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics is a Spenglerian 1948 book by the American fascist Francis Parker Yockey, using the pen name Ulick Varange, that calls for a neo-Nazi pan-European empire. The book was dedicated to Adolf Hitler, who Yockey called "the hero of the Second World War". The book scorns democracy and equality, its main theme is a metahistorical antisemitism, and it asserts the Holocaust never happened. Summary. Yockey adopted Spenglerian ideas in "Imperium," although Yockey's extreme antisemitism differed him from Spengler. Yockey described "high culture" as an  organic being, "a Life-form at the peak of the organic hierarchy of which plants, animals and men are the lower beings", and like Spengler, Yockey argued that high cultures follow an organic pattern of birth, growth, maturity, fulfillment and death. He asserted that West was the last remaining high culture of eight in world history. He wrote that each high culture has a soul that seizes humans in its sphere of influence, and determines its religious expression, science, art forms, state structures, politics and morality throughout its life span. Races, he argued, are "spirituo-biological", changeable, fluid constructions, and  raw material for cultural expression, differing in their degree of will to power. He argued that civilization is not an end product of progress, but a certain phase in the life of each high culture, and that high cultures are moved by will to power and a "spiritual drive" to fulfill "destiny" and "mission". Yockey wrote that the West's fulfillment of its destiny was threatened by "cultural pathology", including interrelated sicknesses of "culture-parasitism", "culture-retardation" and "culture-distortion". Non-Western groups in Western countries, he argued, deprived the West of its spritiual energy by their presence and thus  distorted its life path. Yockey made the crank argument that Slavic, Jewish and Asian immigration had displaced unborn people in the early 20th century in the United States. He argued that Jews were most harmful to the Western soul and aggravated a deeper crisis in the West by allegedly promoting materialism, rationalism, liberalism, democracy, equality, feminism, capitalism and communism. He characterized the United States as a mongrelized colony lost in the "the American Revolution of 1933", the presidential victory of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which he alleged was a Jewish seizure of political power, as opposed to "the European Revolution of  1933" represented by the rise of Hitler in Germany. According to Yockey, Hitler set Europe toward a fulfillment of its destiny as a unified empire, which the United States sided with Russia to stop. Yockey decried the postwar trials by "extra-European forces" that he termed "show trials", and in an early example of Holocaust denial claimed the gas chambers were faked to discredit the Nazis. Yockey declared fascism the "spirit of the age", and saw the outcomes of the world wars as temporary setbacks toward an ultimate goal of American exclusion from Europe and a fascist revolution in the  United States. Publication. Yockey wrote "Imperium" at an inn in Brittas Bay, Ireland. "Imperium" spanned 600 pages in two volumes. In Yockey's pseudonym, "Ulick" was supposedly a Danish-Irish name, and "Varange" was a reference to Norsemen. Yockey invited Oswald Mosley to publish it in his name, but Mosley refused. Publication was financed by the Mosleyites Guy Chesham, Peter Huxley-Blythe and Baroness von Pflugl. The far-right activist and antisemite Willis Carto acquired the rights to "Imperium" from Westropa Press, and published it more widely in 1948. The 1962 edition, published after Yockey's suicide in jail in  1960, included an introduction by Carto, along with Revilo P. Oliver's positive review. Influence. "Imperium" has been called one of the most influential antisemitic books since Hitler's "Mein Kampf". It influenced the American neo-Nazi James H. Madole, the racial Odinist Else Christensen, the fascist Christian Bouchet and the British neo-Nazi David Myatt. Some others on the far right considered "Imperium" the "impenetrable ramblings of a madman". The book's ideology was adopted by Willis Carto for the National Youth Alliance and some members of groups such as the Liberty Lobby (founded by Carto) and the American  Independent Party. Liberty Lobby and its spinoffs promoted Imperium as the "Mein Kampf" of postwar Nazism. Italian hermetic philosopher Julius Evola praised Yockey’s work.