British Fascism after the Holocaust by Mulhall Joe;

Author:Mulhall, Joe;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Francis Parker Yockey: an alternative Europeanism

While understandably the most famous, Mosley was by no means the only fascist operating in Britain in the immediate postwar period who was calling for a shift towards a united Europe. Francis Parker Yockey was an American Nazi sympathiser who, extraordinarily, spent time as part of the US legal team at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials.113 After his dismissal he moved to Dublin before heading to Brittas Bay in County Wicklow where he wrote his magnum opus, the Spenglerian tome Imperium.114 Sometime in the autumn of 1947 he travelled to England in search of Oswald Mosley where he subsequently became involved in Union Movement activity, perhaps even becoming a paid member of the European Contact Section of the party.115 He published Imperium in London in 1948 expecting a warm welcome from Mosley due to the similar calls for a united Europe but was shocked when he rejected it and turned against Yockey. Spurned and angered, Yockey, along with a small group of UM members such as John Gannon and Guy Chesham, left to form the European Liberation Front (ELF). Never numbering more than around 150 members and with its newspaper Frontfighter having a monthly circulation of only 500, the group stagnated and had disbanded by 1954.116 To understand properly why Mosley rejected Yockey’s advances and why Yockey eventually felt he had to break with him completely it is necessary to explore in more depth the ideas proposed by Yockey. They also provide an alternative fascistic vision of European unity emanating from Britain in the immediate postwar period.

At a cursory glance, Yockey’s work, with his call for European unity, was strikingly similar to that of Mosley. Imperium argued:

This is the battle of the Idea of the Unity of the West against the nationalism of the 19th century. Here stand opposed the ideas of Empire and petty-Stateism, large-space thinking and political provincialism. Here find themselves opposed the miserable collection of yesterday-patriots and the custodians of the Future. The yesterday-nationalists are nothing but the puppets of the extra-European forces who conquer Europe by dividing it. To the enemies of Europe, there must be no rapprochement, no understanding, no union of the old units of Europe into a new unit, capable of carrying on 20th century politics.117

Put more succinctly in the opening lines of his 1949 Proclamation of London, he stated that ‘Throughout all Europe there is stirring today a great superpersonal Idea, the Idea of the Imperium of Europe, the permanent and perfect union of the peoples and nations of Europe’.118 However, while the outcome, a united Europe, was the same as Mosley’s, Yockey’s reasoning for its necessity had some important differences.

While Mosley diverged from orthodox Spenglerianism by arguing that decline could be reversed, Yockey was a true disciple, rejecting the Eurocentric narrative119 and unilinear view of history120 and accepting the pessimistic determinist conclusions laid out in the Decline of the West. This was so much so, in fact, that Yockey adopted the name Oswald Spengler and was known to use it in correspondence.

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