Yockey

*

Despite his status as a notorious post-war neo-Nazi, I concluded that Francis Parker Yockey is not racist enough—remember, you can never be too racist. Men like Spengler, Evola, and Yockey have a very particular definition of “race”—so particular that I think it’s a misnomer to use the term “race” for the concept they adumbrate.

For these men, “race” could be better described as “spiritedness” or “group spiritedness”—perhaps even “thymos”. Men like Evola are apt to say “he has race” in the same way as an old man, circa 1909, might say “that lad has spirit”. This is what is meant by “spiritual” race—it is nothing like a person who has a table that links race and IQ; and for men like Evola, Spengler, and Yockey that is explicit because for them Darwinism and IQ are “progressive” artefacts from rationalism—whereas they are for the spirit.

For Yockey and Spengler in particular, race is connected to landscape—both believe that landscape makes and remakes a race. The idea, as put forward by Yockey, is that race emerges from a rhythmical relationship between man and his landscape (blood and soil). CG Jung held similar views, ultimately related to Goethe’s alchemical “rhythmical science”, and so observed that Americans looked like Red Indians—the soil had remade them.

Perhaps we contemporaries could say that man is a mirror (memetic) and Americans mirror their landscape and so came to look like Red Indians (and also tend to say everything is “awesome”—because, for them, everything, from the Empire State Building to the Grand Canyon, is awesome; it’s all monumental—they just say what they see).

Ironically, the people you might regard as “the most right-wing men in the 20th century” actually hold a view as regards race that makes it more mutable than any genetics test or even, to use the old methods favoured by men like Carlton Coon, a blood test would show. Yockey, Spengler, and Evola can easily affirm that people can “become Italian”, for example, just as progressives speak about how “the Irish became white”.

For sure, this is not an idea that people can experience mass “race conversion” and it is selective—as if a father evaluated an outsider who wanted to marry his daughter through tribal tests and then decided he is “one of us”; and yet it is quite mutable, whereas the right is usually associated with the idea that race and sex are immutable and it is their immutability that accounts for hierarchy and differences in life outcomes (due to other factors associated with racial and sexual groups).

Hence men like Yockey and Evola can happily assert that Jews can become European—provided that the culture unit they belong to has been broken down (i.e. no Anti-Defamation League, no B’nai B’rith—no special group organisations); and will also happily assert that people can have Aryan souls in Jewish bodies and Jewish souls in Aryan bodies. It depends what rhythm beats in your heart.

**

For men like Spengler, Evola, and Yockey the typical “race science view” excoriated by progressives and defended by the dissident right today constitutes “leftism”. It’s materialist—it comes in with an English view connected to capitalism, liberalism, and ideas of progress (ideas of nations that compete between each other to the knife, as opposed to a European spiritual empire). Nietzsche voiced similar views when he traced Darwinism to Malthusian thought and then argued that Malthusianism merely reflected a particular English situation—an expression of the English soul and destiny, Spengler might say.

There’s an irony in this outlook, particularly with Yockey, because Yockey, the ultra-Hitlerite, really just restates Spengler with the proviso that the West’s destiny to enter the “empire phase” of civilisation has been distorted by Jewish cultural influence within America. Yet Yockey doesn’t realise that the conceptualisation of race he uses, from Spengler, derives from Boas. Spengler thought “the land will remake you” because he read about Boas’s research into changes in cephalic indexes in immigrant populations in America.

Boas was, of course, one of the “culture distorters” so disdained by Yockey—and his research has been used by liberals for decades to argue “race” doesn’t exist, because, as his research demonstrated, supposedly, diet can cause massive changes in, frankly, yer head; and so ideas like “race and IQ” are null and void. Hence we have the spectacle that one of the leading post-war neo-Nazis, Yockey, has a conceptualisation of race that is almost identical to his progressive interlocutors—it being based on, in part, the research by Boas that showed that “race” is mutable through diet.

***

I doubt Yockey would have affirmed Spengler’s views on race if he knew their actual provenance. Actually, it’s not the only commonality Yockey has with post-war progressives—both share a radical historicism, inherited from Spengler in Yockey’s case (but originating in Nietzsche for both). For Yockey, as much as for a liberal professor today, your historical situation determines everything—if you lived in an era when Sun went round the Earth then it *really did*, there is no objective fact outside history.

I have to say I find this tiresome because men like Spengler and Yockey will mock the materialistic scientific view as just a historical phase that has recurred many times before—and hence is in a sense not “real”. And yet this view poses the old dilemma of Archimedes, “I would move the Earth itself…if I was given a place to stand.” Yet where do Spengler and Yockey stand? Somehow they can confidently damn scientific materialism as “just a historical phase” and yet are they not also in a historical phase? Technically, scientific materialism is not more or less true than a mystical view on this account—being just an historical phase—and yet Yockey, in particular, speaks as if it is “not true” whereas the spiritual view is “true”.

This is why I am not a Spenglerian. Where does Spengler stand? Rather like Marx, Spengler puts forward a “subjective view” yet excepts himself from it. Marx was bourgeois, yet he said that people’s views are conditioned by their relation to property—yet Marx could stand outside his relation to property to take the proletariat side; hence it is possible for people to reach conclusions independent from their relation to property; hence their views cannot be determined by their property; hence the original thesis fails. The existence of Marx himself refutes his own thesis.

Spengler has the same problem. Where does Spengler stand? How can he be outside history himself? Yet he writes as if he can—he never grants science, politics, art, religion, or magic any autonomous existence at all; all are slaved to history and must follow history’s laws—which, in turn, paradoxically, say everything is relative and there are no absolute rules because everything is conditioned by history (except history and Spengler—who in a convenient conceit stand outside the rules so established, just like Marx).

This view, which is really Nietzsche’s invention, remains hugely influential today—although mostly in a leftist direction. It’s why people think they can cast Richard III as a black woman, why people speak about “how the Irish became white”, and why people think “people thought differently then, now we think differently”—now everything is different.

Yet when I pick up a book by Herodotus it’s not some “alien world, unfathomable”—it’s actually fully comprehensible to me mutatis mutandis. The fact is that men like Spengler and Nietzsche tend to be a bit pretentious—it’s common with aesthetes; and they tend to get very precious and lyrical about the differences between various styles and periods (which really often amounts to showing off); and the need to make elaborate differences between eras leads to ideas like “the Greeks didn’t have a word for ‘blue’” which turns into “‘blue’ didn’t exist in the Greek world”.

This is based, partly, on an observation by Homer as regards the “wine-dark sea”—well, you know, if you look at the sea, particularly in the Mediterranean, it sometimes looks like dark wine (purple). That’s why Homer calls it that—not because he didn’t have the concept “blue”. Only academics could become confused about such an idea because they are so limited in their perception that they haven’t gone and looked at the sea. It’s how you end with articles entitled “The invention of ‘blue’: cultural trends in the elaboration of a ‘colour’ 1746 to 1864”.

Hence historical periods become “unbridgeable gulfs”—and often these gulfs are explained in a lapidary and somewhat histrionic (precious) style; and then there’s a corollary that if we change what we think we can change reality today (easily)—which is usually a leftist idea but can also manifest, via historicism, in the right (per Spengler, Evola, and Yockey). It ends in a parody of magical thinking—“if I say I’m a woman, I’m a woman; just like we invented ‘blue’ in 1746”. It’s a parody of magical thought, pilloried by scientific materialists as such, because it amounts to “if I say it’s so, it is”—actual magic has objective content and rules, though.

I just don’t see the “unbridgeable gulf”—even the Mayans seem comprehensible to me (once translated). I think there’s a lot pretentious bunk (wank) spoken about “the ineffable difference” between historical periods, when, actually, the motivations of Marcus Aurelius or Jesus are quite understandable (even to the average man on the street)—because although men differ they don’t differ that much from one period to the next.

So I don’t buy it—I don’t really buy Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values fully, either. Despite being “crippled by slave morality” Europeans managed to conquer the entire globe—so Christianity perhaps slowed them up at most. Indeed, I think Europeans conquered the globe, in part, because of Christian “slave morality”—because it conferred positive ethnocentrism on them, “we are Zion, we are the new Jews, we are the people of the new covenant”; and that made Europeans more effective warriors (“chosen” + “special mission”) than under paganism.

****

It’s why I accept Darwin. Evola, Spengler, Nietzsche, and Yockey reject Darwin because in their time Darwinism was associated with a smug bourgeois liberal materialism that asserted “everything evolves upwards”—everything is getting better and better, and that ends in liberalism and an abundant consumer economy and “the last man”. Darwinism is also castigated as being quantitative, being just about how many children and/or genes (today) go forward.

However, the popular Darwinism misunderstood Darwin—evolution by natural selection does not necessarily mean an ascent upwards. That conflates the term “evolution” with its older, pre-Darwinian sense—the word was popular around the time of the Enlightenment and became synonymous with “progress” (progress and evolution).

Yet evolution by natural selection could as well be leading us to evolve into brainless sponge-like organisms (a suitably pessimistic Spenglerian thought) as it is causing us to evolve into smug mid-Victorian gentlemen-merchants. Victorians imposed a progressive teleology on evolution that doesn’t exist in the theory itself.

To me, Darwinism is religious: it’s predicated on a separation of the sheep and the goats, the tares and the wheat—its essence is not “x number survive” but rather the selection process itself. It’s that there is a die-off that’s relevant—and that’s what is novel in Darwinism, not the tautological statement “things that survive have survived”.

It’s what’s “metaphysical” in Darwinism, the die-off (Malthusian) relates back to ideas like destiny and fate—as beloved by Spengler and Yockey. Alfred Russel likened evolution to the governor on a steam engine—and this whirligig is like a swastika, like a revolving cyclone. It changes to stay the same—it’s Heraclitean. Life is war.

There’s nothing “smug”, liberal, or bourgeois about Darwinism at all. It’s rooted in nature, in reproduction—and you can hardly have a less rhythmical thing than reproduction (rock ‘n’ roll is literally slang for sex, for the rhythmical motion of sex—“the motion of the ocean, I want to be down in your South Seas”). This is why I say that Evola and Yockey were not racist enough: they have a kind of delicate sensibility, like a spinster who listens to Wagner in a crenellated chateau, that Darwin is too “crude and bloody and vulgar”—even as they themselves extol Heraclitus, “war is the king of all”.

The implications from Darwinism are hardly liberal—and not materialistic either. It’s the judgement of parson Malthus, and rhythm is intrinsic to both sex and war (to the Darwinian cull). So I think race is much more immutable than Yockey, Evola, and Spengler held—its rhythm being in war and sex (that’s where soul is). I think their error is to be one-sided, just like progressives only accept cultural factors and dismiss race altogether. For me, biology and spirit interpenetrate (yin-yang)—it’s a more Jungian stance, you can’t have one without the other; and the way to access the higher realm is to accept lower (blood —> spirit).

What men like Spengler, Yockey, and Evola want to do is push down with an Olympian “spiritual view” that is superior to all, whereas I think the mundane biological world, once accepted, constitutes the path to the divine—the path is the mystery of blood. So I think race is immutable, its rhythm is found in Darwinian war, and that the path to the higher is through the lower—as Dante entered Hell to attain Heaven.