3,945 words

IT will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. . . . — Herman Melville, “Extracts (SUPPLIED BY A SUB-SUB-LIBRARIAN),” Moby Dick

The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Having recently been given the privilege, and pleasure, of preparing an index for the forthcoming Centennial Edition of Francis Parker Yockey’s magnum opus, Imperium, I thought there might be some interest in detailing a few of the linguistic oddities that turned up.

Of course, in themselves, these may be just trivia, cocktail party bons mots. But the word trivia is derived from the mediaeval trivium, the basis for higher intellectual pursuits.^[1] This information might, or should, be the basis for additional research on Yockey’s thought process.

The story of the unique circumstances of its genesis are detailed in the Preface by the General Editor, Greg Johnson, as well as Willis Carto’s legendary Introduction to the Noonday Press edition, which has been retained in this, the first truly scholarly edition.

Briefly, Yockey sought refuge in Brittas Bay, Ireland, where, with only a handful of his most important books — including the works of Spengler, of course — and entirely without notes, produced the 600-plus pages of Imperium in about six months. Despite these handicaps, Yockey appears to have been able to quote what he needed from memory, with remarkable, in some cases word-for-word accuracy.[2]

Yockey, in short, was quite the wordsmith. His status as the Emmanuel Goldstein of the post-war American Right, as its brain, for lack of a better word or a better candidate, lies less in his philosophy of history — derived rather too reverently from Spengler, referred to throughout in hushed tones as “the Philosopher”[3] — than in its judicious — tactful, as the Philosopher might say — applications to the post-war scene, but perhaps above all in its rhetoric. In reading Imperium, I was sometimes reminded of someone’s description of Hegel’s Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit: “It roars like a Romantic symphony.”[4] Perhaps, then, Imperium is as worthy of a word study as any ancient classic — including, perhaps, that other Bible.

* * *

Like all good Americans,[5] Yockey spends a lot of time and space on his homeland, devoting the entirety of one of the six divisions of the book, over a hundred pages and 13 chapters, in addition to many references throughout the remainder. Also like all good Americans, he calls his homeland America, over 500 times.

It’s always been a bit of a bother to the rest of the residents of North America, as well as the rest of the New World, that Americans have colonized the words America and Americans for themselves alone.

Latin Americans are little better, referring to us as Norte-americanos, as if Canada had lost the War of 1812. However, they do have the handy term Estadounidense, from the Spanish Estados Unidos. However, “Unitedstaters” just doesn’t work. Ayn Rand’s role model, Frank Lloyd Wright, proposed the similar formation Usonian, and though he used it for a style of housing, it never caught on.[6]

In any event, the striking thing is that Yockey stubbornly refuses to use the term “United States” at all; it appears only four times, less than 1% of the uses of “America”:

Beginning around 1880, the Jews embarked upon what Hilaire Belloc aptly termed an invasion of the United States.

Thus America decided, in the middle of the nineteenth century, that a Chinaman born in the United States thereby acquired exactly the same American citizenship as the white native population of European derivation.

The failure to arouse excitement, despite the propaganda bombardment, led to the thesis that Europe was planning to invade the United States with fleets and armies.

As was noted in the outline of the general thesis of Culture-distortion as a form of Culture-pathology, the Russian anti-Semitic outbreaks after the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–1905, brought about a rupture of diplomatic relations with the United States.

Did Yockey slip up, deviating from his overwhelming preference for “America,” or is there some pattern here? The first three are in contexts referring to invasions, by immigrants or armies; the first and fourth refer to Jews, and as we’ll see, Jews seem to have a perturbing effect on Yockey’s vocabulary. The first is a paraphrase from Belloc’s The Jews, and indeed perhaps the rest are derived from hazy memories of something he read somewhere, a rather common occurrence in Imperium.

Also of interest and possible value is a single reference to “The United States of North America.” This is a usage that I’ve only ever seen once before, in Schopenhauer’s essay, published in English as “Government.”[7] Yockey would have found Schopenhauer’s contempt for the Rationalist/Utilitarian/Protestant roots of America to be congenial with his own views, and one must again speculate if this hapax legomenon came from pleasant memories of an afternoon reading the great Pessimist.

* * *

Say what you will, Yockey gives equal time to the other power threatening Europe, naming them consistently as “Russia.” You might imagine Yockey pounding the table, ranting about those dirty Soviet bastards, but in fact he never uses the phrase Soviet Union or Soviets, not once.[8] If necessary to distinguish his target from the previous regime, he prefers Bolshevik Russia or Bolshevik regime. Communists is an all-purpose word, referring to the political ideology, which therefore can be French Communists or German Communists, Communist parties, or Communist propaganda, but never Russians in particular.

Ironically, this gives the text a rather modern flavor. In the Anglosphere, efforts were made at times to distinguish the evil Soviet Union from the downtrodden Russians — perhaps honestly, perhaps only for propaganda purposes. After the implosion of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the Russian Federation, the latter became known, at least informally, as Russia as well, and thus its citizens — even Moslem Chechens — as Russians (as with Americans), and only Boomers who came of age during the Cold War would reflexively say things like “When the Soviets invaded Ukraine . . .”

Yockey operates with a somewhat different distinction in mind. For him, Russians are not an oppressed people yearning to breath free, but a horde of barbarian Mongols, ready to sweep over the Western World in an orgy of mindless destruction. Atop this horde rides the Petrine stratum, i.e. the post-Peter elite who take the West as their model. The October Revolution merely replaced this failed elite with Bolsheviks hoping to use Western technology to destroy the West, under the direction of the Jews.^[9] Today the Petrine stratum seems to have returned, in the form of Westernizers or “Liberals,” while former Communists are often found making common cause with Patriots or Nationalists as representatives of “Russia.”[10]

* * *

“What then of the Jews?” I hear you shout. Well, they certainly get their fair share of attention throughout Imperium. Interestingly, and appropriately, Zionism is another hapax legomenon, occurring only once in the entire text, where Yockey mentions it merely as one means used by the Jews to resist assimilation.[11] The idea is also implied once, where Yockey speaks of Russia’s post-war policy of negating American policy at every point except support for “the question of partitioning of Palestine,” which he calls “a part of the world of Islam.”[12] I suppose he’s just not that interested in the subject in 1948, which obviously became more pertinent after his death in 1960.

Jews also seem to provoke another eccentricity, but first I have to back up to a more general topic. Yockey writes in a rather Germanic style, influenced no doubt by Spengler, and is fond of forming compound nouns such as “Culture-distorter.” However, as in German (or Sanskrit), these can take on far more units than is customary in English. In any case, they give some clue to his conceptual networks.

Perhaps Yockey’s favorite grouping is “Race, People, Nation, State,” which get their own chapter. But when he comes to compounding them throughout the text, then all bets are off. Yockey uses 12 variations of this phrase, changing the order and sometimes adding Culture, Church, Empire, or Religion, with no obvious difference in meaning, and usually once only:

Culture-Nation-State-People-Race

Culture-State-Nation-People-Race

Culture-State-Nation-People-Race-Empire

Culture-State-Nation-People-Religion-Race

Culture-State-Nation-Race-People

Culture-State-Nation-Religion-People-Race

Nation, Church, State, People, Race, and Culture

Nation, People, Race, Culture

People, Race, Nation, State, Society, Will and economy [sic]

race, nation, and Culture [sic]

Race, People, Nation, State, Culture

Moreover, and to return to the subject of the Jews, he has seven more variations, each used only once or twice, and only when discussing the Jews:

Church-State-Nation-People-Race (twice)

Church-State-People-Nation

Culture-Nation-State-Church-People-Race

Culture-Nation-State-Race (twice)

Culture-State-Nation-Church-Race

Culture-State-Nation-People-Religion-Race

Culture-State-Nation-Race

You’ll notice the extra perversity of only using “Church” to refer to the Jews.

What are we to make of all this?

* * *

One might attribute, or write off, this terminological uncertainty to the aforementioned conditions of its composition — one might allude to Dr. (Samuel) Johnson and say that the miracle is that the book exists at all, much less has any consistency[13] — but this almost quantum level of indeterminacy is found even in more considered works.

For example, in The Proclamation of London, a deliberate condensation of Imperium, which one might consider as the Communist Manifesto to the latter’s Das Kapital, we find the Jews referred to on one page as a Culture-State-Nation-Race-People-Society, while on the next page they are reduced to as a mere State-Nation-Race.[14]

But there is a way to understand Yockey as having a method — and appreciate it! I suggest considering what Bernardo Kastrup says concerning his attempt to “decode” Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and liberate it from modern “scholars” who decry its supposed “contradictions”:

Those who hope to truly understand Schopenhauer do not expect from him the kind of rigorous, consequent, consistent use of terms that is today characteristic of analytic philosophers. His intended denotations of key terms are context-dependent.

To understand Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, one must read him charitably, always looking for the particular one, amongst the various possible denotations of a term which fits most coherently into his overall scheme.[15] The interpretational flexibility this requires is familiar to every non-philosopher in everyday conversation: despite often loose use of words by one’s interlocutor, one knows what is meant because of the context. Indeed, what makes Schopenhauer so delightful to read is precisely that he writes in a colloquial manner, as if he were trying to verbally explain something to the reader in person. This is perfectly feasible because Schopenhauer is delightfully verbose: he repeatedly recapitulates and summarizes — using different words and constructs — what he has already said. So we must reciprocate and interpret him with equally colloquial flexibility.[16]

Of course, Yockey could hardly be described as “conversational,” but I think the hermeneutic principle holds.

Although written in conditions of isolation, Imperium was not written as an academic treatise or a journal article, nor was it something like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (titled in Greek as “To Himself”). But it was also more than a barroom conversation. It was an attempt to communicate a call to action in conditions of cultural emergency, an emergency that almost everyone was ignoring, denying, or celebrating. He combines and recombines his major concepts, trying out one or the other, until something clicks in the reader’s mind and he gets it.

General Editor Greg Johnson clues us in:

Why, then, did Yockey publish Imperium? Yockey was not primarily a philosopher. He was a man of action. He wrote Imperium (or wrote it down) because he wanted to have an impact on his time. This book was not written as a work of scholarship. It was forged as a tool — or a weapon. [17]

Perhaps this is the point where the Indexer needs to rejoin the public, stepping back to take in the work as a whole — an organic whole, as Yockey would insist.[18]

Is this whole our Whale, published a hundred years later, by another long-voyaging Isolato?[19] In that case, what does Melville, and perhaps Yockey, advise your humble servant in this matter?

So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub . . . Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness — Give it up, Sub-Subs!

A word to the wise guy.

Notes

[1] “In medieval times, the word Trivium referred to the threefold education curriculum encompassing Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric — as opposed to the Quadrivium, which included Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. The Trivium was regarded as a prerequisite of sorts for the Quadrivium, and as the foundation of a liberal arts education. In the word’s earliest use, trivial described what belonged to the Trivium. Merriam-Webster, here.

[2] The editors of the Centennial Edition have sought to identify and verify all of Yockey’s quotes and verbal allusions.

[3] Greg Johnson summarizes “Yockey’s central ideas” as “openly derived from Spengler, whom Yockey styles simply as ‘the Philosopher.’ Imperium takes its very title and topic from Spengler’s concept of imperialism. Yockey’s discussion of the nine High Cultures and their organic life-cycles comes entirely from Spengler. So too does the contrast between Causality thinking and Destiny thinking. Also Spenglerian are Yockey’s ideas on pessimism, the nature of race, the relationship of race and culture, the limits of Darwinism, the cultural alienness of Jews, war and peace, democracy and oligarchy, Prussian socialism vs. Marxism, the ‘German Michel’ problem, and the ‘outer revolt’ of the colored races against the West.” Imperium: The Philosophy of History & Politics (Centennial Edition Publishing, 2024), page xvii.

[4] Although the phrase has stayed with me, I cannot recall who said it. It was from a blurb printed on the back cover of Walter Kaufmann’s translation and commentary thereon, contained in his Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts and Commentary when it was republished as a separate paperback by Anchor Press in the 1960s. I have long since lost the book and it no longer appears on the later editions (if, indeed, it ever did).

[5] I’ve always thought it was out of character for David to drink anything as corrupt as whiskey.

Out of character for him to be murdered, too.

Yes, wasn’t it? But good Americans usually die young on the battlefield, don’t they? Well, the Davids of this world merely occupy space, which is why he was the perfect victim for the perfect murder. —Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)

[6] From Wikipedia: “Usonia (/juːˈsoʊniə/) is a word that was used by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright to refer to the United States in general (in preference over America), and more specifically to his vision for the landscape of the country, including the planning of cities and the architecture of buildings. Wright proposed the use of the adjective Usonian to describe the particular New World character of the American landscape as distinct and free of previous architectural conventions . . .

“The word Usonian appears to have been coined by James Duff Law, a Scottish writer born in 1865. In a miscellaneous collection, Here and There in Two Hemispheres (1903), Law quoted a letter of his own (dated June 18, 1903) that begins ‘We of the United States, in justice to Canadians and Mexicans, have no right to use the title “Americans” when referring to matters pertaining exclusively to ourselves.’ He went on to acknowledge that some author had proposed ‘Usona’ (United States of North America), but that he preferred the form ‘Usonia’. Perhaps the earliest published use by Wright was in 1927:

“‘But why this term ‘America’ has become representative as the name of these United States at home and abroad is past recall. Samuel Butler fitted us with a good name. He called us Usonians, and our Nation of combined States, Usonia.’

“However, this may be a misattribution, as there is as yet no other published evidence that Butler ever used the word.”

[7] First published in English among The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; On Human Nature in 1897. It’s not very complementary: “The United States of North America exhibit the attempt to proceed without any such arbitrary basis [as in a monarchy]; that is to say, to allow abstract right to prevail pure and unalloyed. But the result is not attractive. For with all the material prosperity of the country what do we find? The prevailing sentiment is a base Utilitarianism with its inevitable companion, ignorance; and it is this that has paved the way for a union of stupid Anglican bigotry, foolish prejudice, coarse brutality, and a childish veneration of women. Even worse things are the order of the day: most iniquitous oppression of the black freemen, lynch law, frequent assassination often committed with entire impunity, duels of a savagery elsewhere unknown, now and then open scorn of all law and justice, repudiation of public debts, abominable political rascality towards a neighbouring State, followed by a mercenary raid on its rich territory,—afterwards sought to be excused, on the part of the chief authority of the State, by lies which every one in the country knew to be such and laughed at—an ever-increasing ochlocracy, and finally all the disastrous influence which this abnegation of justice in high quarters must have exercised on private morals. This specimen of a pure constitution on the obverse side of the planet says very little for republics in general, but still less for the imitations of it in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia and Peru.”

[8] As for “Red” or “Reds,” he refers once to Red Spain, once to the Red Terror in Kiev (likely because of the book, Red Terror in Kiev), and even misremembers, for once, a quote (from Gen. MacArthur), replacing “Red Army” with “Russian Army.”

[9] For example: “Thus, there are two Russias: the Bolshevik regime and the true Russia underneath. Bolshevism, with its worship of Western technology and of a silly foreign theory of class war, does not express the soul of the true Russia. This broke out in the insurrection of the Streltsy against Peter the Great and of Pugachev against Catherine the Great.” Imperium, pp. 541-42. And again: “There it is the purely negative will to destroy Culture that has prevented assimilation of Russia by the West, despite the fact that Peter the Great and his dynasty after him tried by every means to Westernize Russia for three centuries. The outburst of 1918 was primarily an expression of the great fact of the failure of the Petrine effort — it had been only superficially successful and had not penetrated to the depths of this powerful negative soul. The Western Culture is the great barrier that also prevents racial assimilation either way in large numbers” — Imperium, p. 301.

[10] Readers may be surprised to learn that the latter consider Putin to be an arch-Westernizer, rather than a knight of Russian Orthodoxy opposing the West. Speaking of Peter, my new favorite conspiracy theory, popular among said Russian patriots, is that the so-called Peter Romanov who returned from the West to become “Peter the Great” was an imposter. “For one thing, the doppelgänger forgot Russian, brutalized his wife, executed his son, grew an extra meter in height, hated Russia and made war on the historic Russia. Peter apologists claim that he was like a Stalin of his time, brutally enforcing his great love for the Russian people to ‘civilize’ them, despite their selfish ingratitude.” For more, there is a video online.

[11] On page 287, where Yockey italicizes his characterization of it: “To halt it, the leaders of the Jews evolved the program of Zionism, which was solely an expedient for maintaining the unity of the Jewish race and maintaining its continued existence as such.”

[12] On page 543. This is part of Yockey’s evidence for “the presence of the distorter [i.e., the Jew] in Russia.” Later, Yockey would conclude from the 1952 Prague treason trial that Stalin had turned against the Jews. See “What Is Behind the Hanging of the Eleven Jews in Prague” in The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey, ed. by Kerry Bolton & John Morgan (Centennial Edition Publishing, 2020), pp. 252-263. I’m not sure how Yockey’s subsequent support of Stalinist Russia fits into his Russian views expressed above.

[13] “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol. I, July 31, 1763.

[14] See pages 99 and 100 in The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey.

[15] While Schopenhauer is certainly not writing in their rather constipated style, it would also be charitable to note that it is analytic philosophers who formulated the principle, however they may deviate from it in practice.

[16] Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics: The Key to Understanding How It Solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics (Iff Books, 2020), pp. 5-6. Years ago, the great Canadian Neoplatonist, John Deck, made a similar recommendation for students of Plotinus: “Plotinus’s philosophy does not, generally speaking, contain demonstrations in Aristotle’s meaning of the word. Nor do his writings, in most cases, seem to reproduce any genuine avenue of discovery. . . . His presentation . . .  is ‘spiral’ rather than linear. In many places he does not so much prove his propositions and notions as accustom his hearers and readers to their truth. The result is that it often seems that he is proving conclusions by premises and premises by conclusion, when in fact he is elaborating an intuition, building up its specific conceptual apparatus, connecting it with the other parts of his thought, and rendering it plausible and acceptable.” John N. Deck, Nature, Contemplation, and the One: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus (University of Toronto Press, 1969; Toronto Heritage series, 2017)

[17] Imperium, p. xix. Yockey’s emergency bulletin might recall the siege mentality of a very different writer — although also a Spengler enthusiast and word-hoarder — William Burroughs: “I offer you nothing. I am not a politician. These are conditions of total emergency. And these are my instructions for total emergency if carried out now could avert the total disaster now on tracks . . . LISTEN TO MY LAST WORDS anywhere. Listen to my last words any world. Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet forever — ‘Don’t let them see us. Don’t tell them what we are doing — Not the ovens — ‘Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the earth?. . . . These are the words of liars cowards collaborators traitors. Liars who want time for more lies . . . The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals: In Naked Lunch, Soft Machine and Nova Express I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested . . .” The opening of Nova Express, somewhat “cut-up.”

[18] “Yeah. It’s got its own system though. It all makes sense when you look at it right. You just have to step back from it, you know?” The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, Christopher McQuarrie, 1995)

[19] Both were published as multivolume works, in small print runs of between 500 and 1,000, at the midpoint in each of their centuries: “In chapter 27 of Moby Dick, Melville coins the word ‘isolatoes’ to describe the crew of the Pequod, and thereby the quintessential solitary (his emphasis): ‘They were nearly all Islands on the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.’” The Hermitary.