Francis Parker Yockey’s Philosophy as an Example of Culture Distortion

by Andrew Hamilton

EVEN BROADLY sympathetic authors of mixed-race background who are tarred as “haters” by Jewry and the government can introduce distortions into otherwise straightforward discussions of race, thereby leading unsuspecting people astray. Two American examples are the (evidently) part-Jewish Francis Parker Yockey (Imperium [1948]) and mulatto Lawrence Dennis (The Coming American Fascism [1936] and The Dynamics of War and Revolution [1940]).

The formulator of a vague neo-Spenglerian philosophy, Yockey wrote that race was primarily “spiritual” rather than biological. He also misrepresented the role of Jews in Western history and society.

Oswald Spengler, who was one-eighth Jewish, likewise rejected the biological foundations of race and minimized the harmful role Jews played in history and in modern times.

Ironically, Yockey probably enjoys his high reputation today because Willis Carto, a right-wing organizational mastermind who founded Liberty Lobby, The Spotlight newspaper, the Institute for Historical Review, and other successful organizations and publications, selected Imperium to be the hoped-for ideological “bible” of the National Youth Alliance (NYA), the predecessor organization of the National Alliance.

A recent National Vanguard article by an author who states that he personally knew James Madole, who once worked with Yockey (“Collaboration Between Francis Parker Yockey and James Madole,” July 2, 2021), says that Yockey was likely one-quarter to one-half Jewish:

In 1962, [one of Yockey’s daughters] visited Madole in New York, and they spent an afternoon talking and reminiscing about her father. Madole told me that she had not read her father’s book and showed no interest in or knowledge of his ideas. She admired him nonetheless. Francesca also revealed that the Yockey family had some Jewish ancestry. Madole later recalled her saying that the family was 50 per cent Jewish. Perhaps that is what she thought and that is what she said – but information contained in Kevin Coogan’s biography of Yockey, Dreamer of the Day, suggests that Yockey’s paternal grandfather (only) was a Jew, which would have made Yockey 25 per cent Jewish (and his daughter 12.5 per cent).

I have always felt that if this were true — if Yockey had some fractional Jewish ancestry — that it would go a long way toward explaining why he adopted a theory that race was based on spirit rather than biology. Under a biological definition, Yockey could not claim to be 100 per cent Aryan, but using his peculiar spiritual definition, he could say that he was entirely of the “European” race. (It should be noted that Oswald Spengler, Yockey’s idol, was one-eighth Jewish by way of a maternal great-grandmother; he, too, undervalued the biological nature of race.)

The revelation that Yockey was 25%-50% Jewish is extremely enlightening, and quite likely the reason (as with Spengler) that he prevaricated about biological race, just as the author says.

Of course, this judgment depends upon the factual accuracy of Yockey’s part-Jewish ancestry. But even if he was White, the distortions he introduced through his philosophy would remain.

Technically, the “one-half” case relies on two (or perhaps three) levels of hearsay: Madole’s account (a verbal recollection from many years previously), and author James Harting’s long-ago discussion with Madole about it. Still, it does not seem the kind of thing either man would easily forget.

The word “hearsay” has an unnecessarily negative connotation, but it should not. It is useful, however, in clarifying the kind of evidence we are relying upon in this case.

Author Harting indicates that Kevin Coogan said Yockey was one-quarter Jewish in his biography Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (1999).

So here we have two independent sources indicating that Yockey was part-Jewish: one friendly (Madole-Harting) and one hostile (Coogan).

Coogan was an Irish American activist who wrote articles for anti-White periodicals such as Mother Jones, The Village Voice, and Patterns of Prejudice (UK), a Jewish hate publication tricked out as an academic journal.

I’ve read Coogan’s biography, which isn’t very good. Lacking sufficient information about his secretive subject, his overlong, heavily-padded book substitutes tendentious, superficial Left-wing accounts of all kinds of individuals and groups hated by Jews, but either wholly unrelated or only tangentially related to Yockey.

I do not recall Coogan’s assertion that Yockey was one-quarter-Jewish. Perhaps I skipped segments of the book, for I would have made a note of it.

My inclination is to accept Madole’s account (with the reservations stated above) over Coogan’s, because its ultimate source is Yockey’s daughter. She presumably knew more about her family’s racial background than Coogan did. I was also unimpressed with Coogan’s book as a whole.

Militating against this, half-Jewish seems intuitively rather high in Yockey’s case. But in this example, intuition cannot trump evidence. Besides, even many full Jews easily pass as White.

It’s been a long time since I read Spengler’s two-volume WWI-era opus The Decline of the West, so I can’t speak directly from memory, but I did make a note from Coogan’s biography that Spengler was not anti-Semitic (which I knew), and portrayed “Judaism” as “Magian” (which I recalled). According to Spengler (via Coogan), Jewry had exhausted its historic vitality centuries ago, surviving in European ghettos like a fossil preserved in amber.

Assuming Coogan accurately characterized Spengler’s purported belief, which to the best of my recollection he did, this is so preposterous that it amounted to a lie even when Spengler wrote it. And that from somebody who was only 1/8 Jewish!

IQ pioneer Arthur Jensen’s quarter-Jewishness likewise affected his thinking, making him indifferent at best to White survival. Despite being 75% White, you can be sure he didn’t harbor a similar cavalier attitude toward Jewish survival.

To me, the most useful thing Yockey did was coin the terms “culture distortion” and “culture distorters.” That is, the terms are valuable, not the convoluted ideological framework he embedded them in.

The idea of “spiritual race” is imprecise and seriously misleading.

How fascinating that two part-Jews — even as little as 1/8 in Spengler’s case — injected a form of damaging culture distortion and confusion into Western dissident discourse! Jews really do exercise a strange dominance over Whites (all Gentiles, I believe), even in cases where only fractional Jewish ancestry is involved.

Unlike most White racialists, Yockey also yearned to forge alliances with the hard Left, again suggesting possible alien racial intrusion into his theorizing.

A National Vanguard commenter stated that “Yockey spent his last days of freedom holed up in the home of a literal rabbi named Scharf.” I recall the business about Scharf, which was widely reported at the time and mentioned in Coogan’s book.

After reading Harting’s article I skimmed hundreds of pages of documents from Yockey’s FBI files released under the Freedom of Information Act.

He was indeed staying with Scharf at the time of his arrest. Scharf was a teacher at a Jewish school, though the school fired him. I don’t believe he was a rabbi. According to one of the FBI reports, Yockey did not actually like Scharf, but found him useful. Still, it is curious that two such secretive men managed to find each other and form some kind of alliance.

The Feds’ documents indicate that Yockey had some psychological problems (not extreme ones, but real), had been apprehended once for shoplifting in Washington, D.C., and married and abandoned at least three women, stealing the life savings of one of them when he left her (about $3,000 cash, which was a lot in 1950s money).

It seems abundantly clear that, contrary to the spiritual race theory he so elaborately expounded in his book, Yockey actively disliked Jews and Blacks on racial (not spiritual) grounds. Everyone who knew him independently told the FBI the same thing. It was a marked personality trait.

This is consistent with some of his letters and lesser-known writings, which seem anti-Jewish in a racial sense, and are therefore clearer and more consistent than what he wrote in Imperium.

But his mixed racial background evidently led him to formulate and propagate a tortuous philosophical theory that he did not actually live by, thereby misdirecting multitudes of people who have only read Imperium, and legions more eager for any excuse to avoid thinking about the deeply disturbing Jewish problem.

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