Francis Parker Yockey

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A lunatic Chaplin imitator
and his greatest fans

Nazism
Icon nazi.svg
First as tragedy
Then as farce

Francis Parker Yockey (1917–1960), alias Ulick Varange, was an American Nazi sympathizer best known for his post-World War II activities in European extreme-right politics. His 1948 book Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, dedicated to "the hero of the Second World War" (Adolf Hitler), was a seminal influence on the post-war neo-fascist movement. His advocated red-brown alliance was a forerunner to the contemporary National Bolshevism ideology.

Yockey borrowed his ideas about the flow of history from Oswald Spengler, author of the 1918 book Decline of the West, which posited that cultures and nations operate in a cyclical pattern in which they are born, reach their height, decline, and eventually die. However, while Spengler opposed fascism, seeing the "age of Caesarism" as the final death rattle of the declining Western civilization, Yockey viewed it as the West's potential salvation from the forces that would kill it, advocating the unification of Europe within an authoritarian or fascist form of government (also a position taken by Oswald Mosley in the post-war years). Likewise, while Spengler saw the Jewish people as part of Western civilization and viewed the Nazis' anti-Semitism as a case of cutting off one's nose to spite their face, Yockey saw the Jews as representing a fundamentally different culture from the Europeans, one that had been corrupting it from within and spreading the "pathologies" of liberalism, democracy, and socialism.

Unlike most of the postwar far right, during the Cold War, he advocated that neo-fascists align with the Soviet Union rather than with conservatives in the United States, viewing the USSR as a pure white nation with a totalitarian political system that had been purged of Jewish influence by Josef Stalin. The United States, by contrast, he saw as racially impure and weak due to "culture distortion", his code word for Jewish influence he uses throughout the book, and a far greater threat to the survival of European civilization. He also saw the Arab nationalist movement as a potential ally of the European far-right due to their shared anti-Zionism. He helped write propaganda for Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Yockey had little influence on the U.S. far-right or neo-Nazis at the time. George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party spurned him, viewing him as a "neo-Strasserite" in his calls for an alliance between the far-right and the far-left. The chief exception was Willis Carto, one of the last people to meet Yockey before his suicide in 1960. He was more influential in Europe, where his ideas became part of the leftish-leaning wing of European neo-fascism, third positionism.

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