Oswald Spengler was inside the Munich Beer Hall on November 8, 1923, when Hitler launched his putsch. Such encounters convinced him that the Nazis were the worst sort of proletarized street rabble. But although he cultivated an aura of political detachment, he was highly political. He wrote Prussianism and Socialism in 1919, in which he took part in the struggle against Russian-style Marxism, German social democracy, and Weimar liberalism. He once transferred funds from a right-wing German politician and former Krupp director named Alfred Hugenberg to one of the Bavarian paramilitary leagues known as the kampfbunde (Coogan pp. 58-59). This was the beginning of divisions in the postwar Fascist International.
The Right-wing versus the Nazis
Spengler was right-wing, but he was not a Nazi. As a political monarchist, he thought real government must be aristocratic, since every nation in history was led by an aristocratic minority. He voted for Hitler in the 1932 elections as part of a broad conservative bloc, but he believed that movements like Nazism were symptoms of Europe’s decline. Hitler’s populist rhetoric, as well as the Nazis’ hooliganism and pandering to the masses, reflected Germany’s problem rather than its solution.
In The Hour of Decision, Spengler attacked the political left for its noisy agitation as a foundation for individual power. But Ernst Roehm’s Stormtroopers were just as bad. Spengler also criticized Italian Fascism.
For Fascism is also a transition. It had its origin in the city mobs and began as a mass party with noise and disturbance and mass oratory; Labor-Socialist tendencies are not unknown to it. But so long as a dictatorship has ‘social service’ ambitions, asserts that it is there for the ‘worker’s’ sake, courts favor in the streets, and is ‘popular,’ so long it remains an interim form. The Caesarism of the future fights solely for power, for empire, and against every description of party (Coogan p. 59).1
Spengler Falls Out With the Nazis
The year Spengler’s book was published, 1933, was also the year the Nazis took power. The Nazis courted him at first, but when his book became an instant bestseller they tried to halt sales. They attacked Spengler’s ‘ice-cold contempt for the people,’ his worship of aristocratic and monarchist society, his pessimism, and his denial of race. (To be clear, Spengler, Francis Parker Yockey and others who argued against the racial basis for anti-Semitism, had no more love for the Jews than the Nazis did. They believed in Jew hatred, but in a more spiritual form.)
It didn’t take long for Hitler’s archivists to discover that Spengler’s great grandfather, Frederick Wilhelm Grantzow, was partly Jewish. In addition, Spengler was too close to Germany’s old ruling classes for comfort. His allies included wealthy business magnates and right-wing nobles like former German chancellor Franz von Papen. Last but not least, Spengler was not an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.
Educated Germany’s Contempt for Judaism, Islam and Christianity
Spengler shared the view of many educated Germans that Judaism was an exhausted belief system that had played out its historic vitality many centuries ago and only survived in Europe’s ghettos like a fossil preserved in amber. And these educated Germans were not any more friendly to Islam and Christianity. Spengler and his ilk even included the Nazi Volk in this group. He believed all of these belief systems were world-denying, escapist, and anti-historical. In his view, Western antipathy was not due to racism at all. It was cultural.
The Fascists Cherry-Pick Spengler’s Ideas
Francis Parker Yockey was completely on board with this view of race. However, unlike Spengler, he believed Hitler was ‘The Hero’, or the new Caesar, not because of but in spite of his ‘plebian racial musings’ (Coogan p 61).
Yockey Learns about Carl Schmitt at Georgetown
Carl Schmitt was Germany’s leading Catholic International and constitutional law theorist and an advisor to Franz von Papen during the Weimar period. He joined the NSDAP May 1933. Yockey became a devotee of Schmitt while studying at Georgetown University.
Yockey plagiarized Schmitt in Imperium. His defense of Machiavelli sounds eerily similar to that of Jacobin. Machiavelli’s book was defensive because Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, and Turks had invaded Italy during his century.
When the French Revolutionary Armies occupied Prussia, and coupled humanitarian sentiments of the rights of Man with brutality and large-scale looting, Hegel and Fichte restored Machiavelli once again to respect as a thinker. He represented a means of defense against a foe armed with a humanitarian ideology. Machiavelli showed the actual role played by verbal sentiments in politics (Yockey, as quoted by Coogan, pp. 74-75)
Carl Schmitt, the Conservative Revolution, the State of Exception, and the Messiah
Spengler inspired a Weimar intellectual current known as the Conservative Revolution. Novelist Ernst Junger and Martin Heidegger were part of it. They believed liberalism, democracy, individualism, and Enlightenment rationalism were part of a superficial and materialistic capitalist society. When the liberal order collapses, a new virile man of adventure will arise–a kind of Western ronin willing to risk all and with a mystical belief in the state.
Schmitt particularly despised Weimar parliamentary democracy. His theory for overcoming constitutional rule was the ‘state of exception, or ‘legal positivism’. This meant suspending the constitution during a crisis. He believed ending the constitutional order opened a path for a new heroic ‘politics of authenticity’.
Like Spengler, Schmitt saw the state as supreme. He believed government proceeded in three dialectic states: from the absolute state of the 17th and 18th centuries; through the neutral state of the liberal 19th century; to the totalitarian state in which state and society are identical.
Father Walsh observed that the final stage of Schmitt’s idea ‘was the monopoly of all power, all authority, all will in the Führer, conceived and accepted as Messiah endowed with unlimited legal prerogatives in a state under perpetual martial law.’
Schmitt Endorsed Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives
Schmitt endorsed Hitler’s bloodletting on The Night of the Long Knives, but the killing cut both ways. Hitler also used the purge to intimidate his potential rivals in the old military and political establishment who had given him political respectability. He even murdered one of Franz von Papen’s closest aides. The following quote is the Nazi challenge to the old guard.
“If we had relied upon those suave cavaliers (the reactionaries), Germany would have been lost. These circles sitting in armchairs in their exclusive clubs, smoking big cigars and discussing how to solve unemployment, are laughable dwarfs, always talking and never acting. If we stamp our feet, they will scurry to their holes like mice. We have the power and we will keep it” (Joseph Goebbels, June 1934, as quoted by Coogan, p. 77).
The Nazi’s Turn Against Schmitt
In 1936, the Nazis turned on Schmitt and began investigating his ‘non-Aryan’ wife. The SS organ Das Schwarze Korps regularly threatened him. According to Coogan, this was simply a power-play by Himmler to seize total police and judicial power.
Schmitt Retreats to Geopolitics with His Grossraum Theory
In response, Schmitt turned to international law. In 1939, he gave a speech to the Institute of Politics and International Law at the University of Kiel about the legitimacy of an extraterritorial order, a ‘great space order.’ His rationale: the nation-state system had broken down. Now the world had the British, Soviet and American empires, as well as Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. These dwarfed older concepts of ‘nation.’ Enormous shifts in state power demanded corresponding shifts in international law. Grossraum was the proper way forward. Grossraum referred to an area dominated by a power. This would not be the result of organic geopolitical expansion but of a ‘political idea’. Schmitt had in mind a German-dominated Central Europe. This was a political idea distinct from its two universalist opponents–the laissez-faire ideology of Anglo-Saxon capital and the equally universalist Communist ideology. It was a German version of the American Monroe Doctrine.
This impressed Hitler. It also influenced Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler over Eastern Europe’s 1939 Munich Agreement.
Yockey Objects to Schmitt’s Materialism; Haushofer Praises Schmitt; the Nazis Defend the Third Reich’s Racial Justification
Yockey’s criticism of Schmitt focused on Schmitt’s materialism. He said the traditional geopolitics of Schmitt was based on physical facts or geography. Instead, the soul is primary. But at the same time, he believed Schmitt’s researches had permanent value and that large-space thinking was essential.
Yockey praised Haushofer; Haushofer supported Schmitt; and the Nazis disagreed with Haushoffer and Schmitt. Haushofer thought Europe needed a concept like pan-Slavism or pan-Asianism–ideas seeking to manifest themselves in space. Nazi racialists argued that pan-Slavism or pan-Asianism would remove the racist justification from the concept of the German Reich.
Yockey and Newton Jenkins
While Yockey was attending Northwestern’s law school in Chicago, he served as a ‘kind of aide-de-camp’ to a lawyer and important right-wing activist named Newton Jenkins. Jenkins had found his way to fascism from the progressive movement.
Jenkins went to school at Ohio State and Columbia University’s Law School. After serving in World War I, he returned to the Midwest and became legal counsel for many farm groups and agricultural cooperatives. He also began working closely with the Progressive Party and used his radio program to support FDR for President. However, in 1932 he ran for senate in the Republican Party’s primary and was able to win 400,000 votes.
The Yockey-Jenkins connection came to the FBI’s attention through an informant. This informant had seen a March 31,1954 column by Drew Pearson, which attacked Soviet ties to the far right. In his column, Pearson revealed that the FBI was interested in Varange (Yockey’s pen name in Imperium), and he identified Varange as Francis Parker Yockey. As a result, a former acquaintance of Yockey’s from the late 1930s contacted the FBI. According to FBI files, this informant met Yockey in 1938 at the Chicago office of Newton Jenkins. An excerpt from the report follows.
_______recalls that Yockey was an intense, secretive, bitter individual who did not tolerate anyone who would not wholeheartedly agree with his solution to world problems…_______stated that…Yockey was ‘power hungry’ and gave the impression that he would not stop until he became the most powerful individual in the world. _______believes that Yockey will not succeed in this because he creates too may enemies. ________feels that Yockey will go along with any program whether it stemmed from Moscow, Buenos Aires, Yorkville, Tokyo or Washington, D.C., as long as he can be the leader. ________stated that Yockey believed that the world capitalist structure was about to crumble and that fascism was the only solution, but he insisted that it be the Yockey form of fascism and none other…
Coogan pp. 85-86
Jenkins Progressivism
Jenkins was active in promoting the America First Committee the Keep America Out of War Committee, and similar organizations working for the defeat of Russia and Communism. He also maintained ties to the German American Bund. According to George Britt’s 1940 book, The Fifth Column is Here, Jenkins has an extensive record of pro-Hitler comments. Also, Jenkins attempted to unite fascist and Nazi groups into a third political party. This led the Bund to christen him The Leader of the Third Party (cited by Coogan).
Jenkins Makes a Right Turn
Jenkins began his right turn in 1934 when he formed The Third Party under the slogan ‘U.S. Unite?’ Party headquarters was 39 South La Salle Street, the same office where the FBI informant had met Yockey. In his pamphlet, The Third Party, Jenkins portrayed himself as a progressive opposed to big business. He explained that he was founding his new organization because Franklin Roosevelt had backed down on implementing the more radical aspects of the New Deal. He also warned that the British Empire had too much influence over American foreign policy.
Jenkins favored active government intervention in the economy and thought Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany were models for America. To support his efforts, Jenkins began contacting Hitler’s supporters in the ‘Friends of the New Germany‘, which soon became the German-American Bund.
The German-American Bund, the Union Party, and Jenkins’s Ambition to Unite 125 Rightist Groups
In 1936, Jenkins became campaign manager for the Union Party, which turned out to be the most significant third-party challenge to FDR. After the Party’s defeat, Jenkins maintained relations with the Bund. He spoke at the Bund’s 1937 National Convention at Camp Siegrried in New York. He then launched his own paper, American Nationalism, which served as the propaganda arm of yet another Jenkins organization, the American Nationalist Political Action Clubs (ANPAC). This organization aimed to unite over 125 rightist groups into a coordinated movement (Coogan, pp. 87-88).
Yockey Was a Weimar ‘New Right’ Anti-American
Yockey’s attraction to both Spengler and Conservative Revolution theorists like Carl Schmitt made him virtually unique in the American far right. American supporters of Nazi Germany were usually German Americans, crude anti-Semitic nativists, or staunch conservatives who viewed Hitler as a heaven-sent bulwark against Bolshevism. By contrast, Yockey represented a Nazified version of the Weimar “New right” Conservative Revolutionary current.
Yockey devoted over a hundred pages of Imperium to describing an America incapable of ‘destiny thinking’. In this he was heavily dependent on Oswald Spengler, who had the following to say about ‘hundred percent Americanism‘:
A mass existence standardized to a low average level, a primitive pose, or a promise for the future?…America with its ‘intellectually primitive upper class, obsessed as it is by the thought of money, lacked that element of historic tragedy, of great destiny, that has widened and chastened the soul of Western peoples through the centuries. America was little more than a boundless field and a population of trappers, drifting from town to town in the dollar-hunt, unscrupulous and dissolute, for the law is only for those who are not cunning or powerful enough to ignore it (Spengler paraphrased by Coogan p. 132).
Spengler goes on to liken the United States to the Russian form of State socialism or State capitalism. It doesn’t grow organically. It grows through soulless mechanization. (You will recall that the idea of an ‘organic’ state was the first heresy of German geopolitics according to Father Walsh. Here Spengler faults the United States for growing mechanically, rather than organically.)
Yockey was every bit as insulting as Spengler. Coogan sums Yockey’s arguments up this way: ‘A Nation, in short, is a people containing a Cultural Idea. Because America lacks a Cultural Idea, America, by definition, is not a nation.’
Yockey also faults what he called the ‘Rationalist Religion’ of America’s Founding Fathers. He argued that this ‘Religion’ came from England through France. But rationalism did not dominate Europe until the 19th century, thanks to Europe’s tradition. America never had this tradition. Furthermore, America’s rationalist and materialist ideology made her vulnerable to domination by the Jewish ‘culture-distorter’.
Yockey’s racism was intense and visceral (Coogans words). It also had ideological roots. Coogan supports this argument with quotes from Hegel’s The Philosophy of History. Yockey was dealing with his own racism, Hegel’s influence, and Spengler’s description of great cultures (Coogan p. 135). For more of Yockey’s criticism of America see Coogan’s Chapter 14, Empire of the Senseless.
Imperium: a New Kind of Fascism
Coogan says the enthusiasm of rightist leaders for Yockey’s book, Imperium, reflected a need for a new kind of fascism. He cites the call for a united Europe by Sir Oswald Mosley. Mosley envisioned ‘a great unity imbued with a sense of high mission, not a market state of jealous battling interests.’
The Right’s Doubts About Yockey
But Mosley turned against Yockey. Mosley not only declined to publish Imperium, he blocked a promised review in the Union Movement paper. This brought much criticism from prominent members of Mosley’s group who wanted more dynamic leadership. Mosley’s biographer Robert Skidelsky explained Mosley’s rationale.
It was part of a process of Mosley’s extrication from the dead hand of pre-war fascism and a rededication to a new, and more moderate crusade. This meant coming to terms with American hegemony over Western Europe. It was this approach that Yockey opposed.
While still in Mosley’s group, Yockey had had discussions about the American question with A. Raven Thomson, one of Mosley’s closest aides. Thomson later wrote in a letter to H. Keith Thompson that Mosley had refused to finance Yockey’s book because it was full of Spenglerian pessimism and unnecessarily offensive to America. After Yockey broke with Mosley’s group, they found him to be ‘so conceited and unstable in personal relations that it is almost impossible to work with him‘ (Coogan, p. 171).
Coogan adds a historical explanation for the break: The political climate in Europe in 1948 had become dangerous, with the Berlin Crisis raising the possibility of war. Suddenly the fascist ‘third way’ was called into question.
Yockey Turns to the East
Eventually, Yockey’s book was financed by Baroness Alice von Pilugl. It was during his association with Pilugl that Yockey began advocating far-right cooperation with the Russian conquest of Europe (Coogan p. 172). And this was not the only attempt to ally the radical right with the USSR.
An anti-Yockey British-German group called NATINFORM (the Nationalist Information Bureau) observed Yockey’s meetings. By 1950, it was clear that Yockey et al were promoting a definite line of policy and seeking collaborators. The main trend of this policy was based on Imperium and Yockey’s concepts. In July of 1950, Guy Chesham, who was acting as a representative of Yockey, outlined a policy of infiltrating into all Nationalist groups with a view to seizing control from within or organizing sabotage.
The political direction of this activity was to be violently anti-American, avoiding all anti-Bolshevist conceptions. No anti-Jewish propaganda was to be permitted [at] first (Coogan pp. 173-174).
Yockey Has Company
Yockey was not acting alone in this effort. The right-radical Socialist Reich Party (SRP) was founded in Germany aroung the time of Imperium’s publication. It called for a pro-Eastern neutralist Germany, which was almost identical to Yockey’s position. Yockey’s organization, The European Liberation Front (ELF) was in some respect the SRP’s British cousin.
Two Russias
In the Russia chapter of Imperium, Yockey argues there are really two Russias: The first Russia, symbolized by Peter the Great, wanted to imitate the high culture of the West. But neither Peter nor his successors could implant ‘Western ideas below the surface of the Russian soul’.
…the true spiritual Russia is primitive and religious. It detests Western Culture, Civilization, nations, arts, State-forms, Ideas, religions, cities, technology. This hatred is natural and organic, for this population lies outside the Western organism, and everything Western is therefore hostile and deadly to the Russian soul.
According to Yockey, the Russian Revolution was a revolt of both Russias, the Marxist Western-oriented intelligentsia, and the anti-Western underclass.
The European Liberation Front and Strasserism
Some denounced Yockey and his European Liberation Front (ELF) for being Strasserists. Arnold Leese of the British far right denounced them in the early 1950s. The American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell would label ‘Yockeyism’ a Strasserist perversion of true National Socialism.
Coogan defines Strasserism historically as the anti-big business northern wing of the Nazi Party. It was led in the mid-1920s by the brothers Gregor an Otto Strasser. They mainly recruited factory workers in the industrial north. The Strassers insisted that the Nazis were socialists who would break up the domination of big capital and the vast landed estates and called for an alliance with Russia and the ‘East’ against England and France. (England and France represented the hated enforcers of the Versailles Treaty.) Hitler was angry about their propaganda and their independent power base. He drew his strength from the more conservative Bavaria.
Otto Strasser created the Black Front after he quit the NSDAP to protest Hitler’s alliance with big business and aristocratic elites like the Krupps and the Papens. The Black Front was ‘Strasserist’. Hitler murdered Gregor in 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives.
Historically Yockey was not a Strasserist, but he was a small-s-strasserist in some ways. He had a national Bolshevist foreign policy, rejected biological determinism and hated capitalism. He also maintained ties with Alfred Franke-Gricksch, a key leader of the postwar German far right and a former member of Otto Strasser’s Black Front.
Yockey, Franke-Gricksch, and the Bruderschaft
Both Yockey and Alfred Franke-Gricksch advocated close cooperation between the far right and the East Bloc. The ELF, was also linked to Franke-Gricksch, who was the leading German advisor to the Union Movement at that time. Through Franke-Gricksch, Yockey established relations with an organization referred to as the Bruderschaft (Brotherhood) in Germany.
The Brotherhood was one of the most important groups in Germany’s postwar fascist elite. They used intelligence and organizational contacts with fascist movements around the world to play a role in the Nazi underground railroad that smuggled war criminals to South America and the Middle East. Franke-Gricksch had joined Major Helmut Beck-Broichsitter soon after he founded the Bruderschaft in a British POW camp in 1945-46. In addition, Franke-Gricksch brought with him a plan to recapture power by slow methodical insinuation into government and party positions.
Franke-Gricksch joined the Strassers’ northern wing of the NSDAP. He also became a founding member of the Black Front. Franke-Gricksch went into exile with Otto Strasser after Hitler took power, but later he deserted the Strassers. He may have been responsible for the destruction of the Black Front after his defection. Shortly after he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the SS, the Gestapo was able to penetrate and liquidate the underground apparatus of the Black Front.
Franke-Gricksch’s son, Ekkehard, explained his father’s pre-war activity in a letter to Willis Carto’s Institute for Historical Review. He said that Hitler had distanced himself from his original National Socialist goals. After Alfred Franke-Gricksch fled the country, he returned and came to an agreement on this point with Himmler. He secretly joined the Waffen SS under the name Alfred Franke.
Alfred Franke-Gricksch’s and the German Freedom Movement
According to Coogan, Franke-Gricksch’s activity at the end of the war is more of a concern than his activities during the war. In April 1945, Franke-Gricksch was the head of the Personnel Section of Himmler’s RSHA (the Reich Security Main Office). This was Nazi Germany’s CIA. He spent the last days of the war preparing a blueprint for a postwar fascist Europe. This was The German Freedom Movement (Popular Movement). Among other demands…
it demanded a Nazi Party purge to free it ‘from a degenerate party bureaucracy and the…party bosses, from a ruling caste in State, Party, and Party organizations, which has deceived itself and others for years’ (p. 194).
The German Freedom Movement outlined a new pan-European foreign policy program. It included a 12-point ‘European peace settlement’ and a new ‘Sworn European Community’ of peoples. A ‘European arbitration system’ would secure some form of voluntary allegiance to a ‘Germanic Reich.’
One scholar described Franke-Gricksch’s plan as being based on the ‘call of the blood’ but tempered ‘by the introduction of a federal system and excluding any claim to sole leadership by Germany.’
This movement envisioned a post-Hitler Europe freed from the biological exaltation of the German race. SS technocrats had developed a similar concept. Their ranks included SS Brigadier General Franz Alfred Six.
Pan-European Fascism and the Rehabilitation of Carl Schmitt
SS Lieutenant General Werner Best was another advocate of pan-European fascism. He was a former Conservative Revolutionary, a fan of Ernst Jünger, and a counter-intelligence expert with a doctorate in law. He later became a director of Amt II, which supervised administrative, economic, and judicial matters for the RSHA. Franz Alfred Six was his first AMT II assistant.
From 1940 to 1942, Best was in charge of civil administration for all of occupied France. Then, in December 1942, he became Reich Plenipotentiary to Denmark. He used his power to rehabilitate Carl Schmitt inside the SS because he saw that Schmitt’s Grossraumordnung theory could be useful in the legal reconstruction of Europe. This allowed Schmitt to lecture to elite audiences throughout occupied Europe and Spain.
In Schmitt’s testimony at Nuremberg, he explained that Best’s circle wanted to become an intellectual elite and form a kind of German ‘brain trust’. But since a brain trust was a contradiction in Hitlerism, the concept of Grossraum became their touchstone.
The Reinvention of Fascism and Coogan’s Suspicions About Yockey
After Hitler’s suicide, technocrats like Best, Six, and Franke-Gricksch were free to reinvent fascism. This plan went forward in spite of the fact that until the autumn of 1948, Franke-Gricksch was in a POW camp in Colchester, England. He maintained his leadership position inside the Bruderschaft while in prison. After his return to Germany, he became the group’s ideological leader. Franke-Gricksch preached that the mission for the Bruderschaft was to midwife the creation of a new kind of elite rule now that ‘the era of the masses has passed.’
Coogan suspects that Yockey was acting in concert with the Bruderschaft while he was in Wiesbaden. Sometime in 1948, Yockey began publicly arguing in London that Russia was the lesser of two evils. Then, in 1949, after Franke-Gricksch had returned to Germany, Yockey, Guy Chesham, and John Gannon founded the ELF.
Divisions in Italian Fascism
There were also postwar divisions in Italian fascism. The divisions inside the MSI dated back to 1943, when the Fascist Grand Council deposed Mussolini. Italy’s Movimento Sociale Italiano (or MSI) was the largest and best-organized fascist movement in postwar Europe. After the Nazis freed Mussolini from an Italian jail, he established a new government known as the Salò Republic in the Nazi-held north of Italy. Subsequently, former fascist leaders and veterans of Salò’s National Republican Army founded MSI.
Because Mussolini believed his downfall was the fault of the old Italian elites, he returned to fascism’s radical roots and demanded the nationalization of Italian industry. After the war his Salò Republic supporters continued to represent a kind of northern Strasserist tendency inside Italian fascism. However, a more moderate wing of the party defeated the Salò radicals at the June 1950 convention. By the fall of 1951, the MSI had reversed its earlier opposition to Italian participation in NATO.
The Radical Wing of the MSI Accepts Yockey’s Imperium
Yockey’s Imperium especially appealed to the most radical wing of Italy’s MSI. MSI’s founder Giorgio Almirante praised Imperium after its publication. Almirante spoke for MSI hardliners opposed to turning the group into a purely parliamentary organization. Yockey was a member of this anti-MSI hard right.
Julius Evola
The journal, Imperium, published Evola’s first postwar political statement in 1950, in which Evola argued against all forms of ‘national fascism’ (including the Salò Republic). He demanded instead a new ‘Gemeinscaft Europas’ best symbolized by the Waffen SS. The arrest of Evola in June of 1951 was one example of the complex political situation in Italy in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Political Pragmatism and NATO in Italy
Italy’s Christian Democrat-led government, and its supporters inside both the Vatican and the CIA, needed the far right to help them oppose the Communists. Many MSI members, however, objected to any cooperation with the state. The MSI had only two options: It could continue to maintain a revolutionary ‘anti-bourgeois’ stand while having some parliamentary presence, or it could accept the status quo and become a full parliamentary organization. A second great choice involved foreign policy. Which superpower was Italy’s main enemy–Russia or America?
Advocates of the parliamentary road generally accepted the postwar order, which included Italian support for NATO. Rejectionists insisted on anti-American neutrality, with some even open to a tactical tilt East. The MSI’s founders, supporters of the Salò Republic, held radically anti-bourgeois ‘left’ corporatist fascist views. Almirante, for example, had earlier helped create the Fasci di Azione Rivoluzionaria (FAR) in 1946.
FAR member Mario Tedeschi said that real fascism had been subverted by conservative forces during the ventennio [twenty years] of power. He accused the monarchy and the plutocratic bourgeoisie of conspiring to bring down Mussolini in 1943. FAR violently opposed the Italian Communists, while at the same time hurling bombs at the U.S. embassy in Rome. FAR members claimed they were remaining true to the radical ideals of Salò.
Italy’s Communist Party (the PCI)
However, MSI’s fear of Italy’s Communist Party (the PCI) caused it to form anti-PCI electoral blocs with the Christian Democrats in Rome and other cities. MSI’s biggest electoral base was also in the conservative south, where a more pragmatic and traditional ‘southerner’ Augusto De Marsanich defeated Almirante in January 1950 for the position of MSI general secretary.
One key to Almirante’s downfall was that he had opposed NATO. In the spring of 1949, the MSI had voted against any Italian role in NATO. But after a bitter debate at the party’s congress in June, the group reversed itself and accepted NATO membership. Not long after that, De Marsanich took power. At this point, the Italian Communist Party began to court the MSI’s anti-NATO wing.
Young Radicals Try to Escape the Embrace of the Christian Democrats and the Communists
In the war between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings of Italian fascism, many young radicals tried to escape the embrace of either the Christian Democrats or the Communists. They considered these parties surrogates for the Americans or the Russians. In the early 1950s, veroniani like Pino Rauti, Clemente Graziani, and mario Gionfrida organized gang-like paramilitary groupings. Believing that democracy was a ‘disease of the soul’, they turned to Baron Evola for inspiration.
Evola Criticises Yockey and Fascist Youth
Evola and Yockey had much in common. They were both admirers of Spengler and held similar views on the question of race. And Evola thought Yockey’s book was important. However, he posed questions for Yockey and a whole generation of fascist youth.
Evola thought Varange (Yockey’s pen name in Imperium) had fundamentally misread Spengler by not taking seriously enough his emphasis on the difference between Kultur and Zivilization. Civilization could only be a time of decline. Yockey insisted on building the Imperium even though the formation of a super-rational and organic united Europe was inconceivable. Furthermore, Yockey had confused the age of Caesarism with the coming of Imperium. His belief that the breakup of the Third Reich made way for the emergence of a pan-European new fascist movement was romantic nonsense in Evola’s view. The NSDAP was a problematic formation in the first place and its breakup could not be transformed into a harbinger of a coming victory.
Dada: Evola’s Long Assault on the Bourgeois Order
Evola first began his assault on the bourgeois order as Italy’s leading exponent of Dada. He collaborated on the Dada journal Revue Blue, and often read his avant-garde poetry in the Cabaret Grotte Dell’Augusteo. He exhibited his Dada paintings in Rome, Milan, Lausanne, and Berlin. Inner Landscape 10:30 A.M. is still displayed at Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna.
Evola discovered Dada in high occultism. There, he learned that it was a dissolution of outdated art forms. In the mid-1920s, he studied magic, alchemy, and Eastern religion as part of Arturo Reghini’s Gruppo di Ur. Reghini claimed to be a representative of the Scuola Italica, a secret order that had supposedly survived the downfall of the Roman Empire. He was a major figure in many Italian theosophical and anthroposophical sects and became a leader of the Italian Rite in Freemasonry. The Italian Rite, created in 1909, was allied with the anti-clerical Plazza del Gesu branch of Masons.
In 1927 Evola published Imperialism pagano, which denounced Catholicism’s influence on Italian culture starting with the alliance between the Church and State begun by the Roman Emperor Constantine. Evola’s denunciation led Father Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, to attack Imperialism pagano. In the Catholic magazine Studium, Montini used Evola’s writings to show what could happen to those who become too obsessed with a ‘metaphysics of obscurity, of cryptology of expression, of pseudo-mystical preciosity, of cabalistic fascinations magically evaporated by the refined drugs of Oriental erudition.’
Evola and René Guénon
Through Reghini, Evola learned of a French Orientalist named René Guénon. Guénon was an important figure in the European occult underground. Evola completely embraced Guénon’s argument that the modern age’s interest in democracy, mass culture, and materialism are all manifestations of the Kali-Yuga. Guénon taught that the Kali-Yuga had infected thinking to the point where Western philosophy has become ‘purely human in character and therefore pertaining merely to the rational order. This rational order replaced the genuine supra-rational and non-human traditional wisdom (Coogan p. 294).
Evola considered fascism another expression of the Kali-Yuga. In this way, he shared Spengler’s objections to Mussolini and Hitler’s pandering to the masses. However, Evola thought the dissolution that came with fascism would clear the way for a new Golden Age.
Even though Evola borrowed Guénon’s ideas, the two men became rivals in a way. Guénon eventually rejected contemporary spiritualistic and theosophic fads in favor of ancient spiritual traditions (Traditions). Evola, on the other hand, refused to separate man from the Gods.
- Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, Autonomedia, Brooklyn, New York, 1999. ↩︎
