conference in Naples was a Nazi from the United States named Francis Parker Yockey, who sought to link fascists into a network of militants dedicated to the overthrow of US interests in Europe. Likely acting as an agent for the Nazis during the war, Yockey somehow became established as a member of the prosecutor’s team at Nuremberg before clashing with his supposed colleagues. Published in 1949, his book Imperium would go on to heavily influence fascist thought—in particular, by encouraging a sweeping cultural turn within the fascist milieu. While Remer would delight in its pages, the Buenos Aires-based Nazi publication Der Weg heralded Imperium as the “bible of the next great European revolution.” Evola would also publish his compliments.182
Yockey’s ideological melding of left and right would set the standard for the remainder of the century. For Yockey, socialism is “the form of an age of political Imperialism, of Authority, of historical philosophy, of superpersonal political imperative.” Capitalism belongs to the past, socialism to a future, and “[t]he only distinction between types of Socialism is between efficient and inefficient, weak and strong, timid and bold.” Like Mussolini, Yockey believed in a socialism of producers, heroic only when also nationalist.
For Yockey, European nations represent a “spiritual organism” that takes shape through a “World-Idea.” They are its essence manifested in cultural form. Such ideas are “living, breathing, pulsating…higher beings” that “utilize human beings for their purposes.”183 These higher spirits are sublimated in race, Yockey believed: “Race, in the objective sense, is the spirituo-biological community of a group…beneath is the strong, primitive beat of the cosmic rhythm in a particular stock; above is the molding, creating, driving Destiny of a High Culture.”184 So race comes to mean, for Yockey, something both biological and spiritual, which builds “strong character, self-discipline, honor, ambition, renunciation of weakness, striving after perfection, superiority, leadership.”185 Meanwhile, culture becomes the visceral actuation of a transcendent, spiritual organism—its everyday practices and rituals of reproduction, such as art, music, sports, and food, all bent on the perfection of the self and the collective. Beyond nationalism, race fulfills the “World-Idea,” which Yockey claimed to understand as tantamount to the history of colonial domination. Yet for him, white culture remained deeply threatened.186
His goal remained clear: a kind of national socialist International. “The Internationale of our times appears in a time when the Spirit of the Age has outgrown political nationalism. The Age of Absolute Politics will not tolerate petty-Stateism [sic],” proclaimed Yockey.187 Like Hitler, Yockey’s understanding of “petty-statism” returned to the critique of parliamentary democracy and even provincial forms of monarchy, leading him to seek a higher, spiritual unity in imperium. Like so many fascists, Yockey’s quest for a kind of spiritual empire brought an admiration of individualists: “Anarchism, the radical denial of the State, and of all organization whatever, is an idea of genuine political force. It is anti-political in its theory, but by its intensity it is political in the only way that politics can manifest itself, i.e., it can bring men into its service and range them against others as enemies.”188 At once, racial socialism becomes a force of imperialism and authority based on an internationalist, quasi-political theory that views itself as a step beyond the crisis of civilization toward the organic future.
After the publication of Imperium, Yockey toured Europe relentlessly with a steamer trunk full of documents and books, broadening the network of postwar fascism. For a time, he worked cordially with Mosley in England, but that ended when Mosley punched him in the face in Hyde Park.189
Yockey traversed the broadening gap between Mosley and Strasser at the time. He personally collaborated with former Strasser’s agent and Black Front cofounder, Alfred Franke-Gricksch, who brought him into the circles of the Bruderschaft (Brotherhood), one of the more well-connected fascist networks in postwar Germany. The Bruderschaft sought to take power “through slow and methodical insinuation into governmental and party positions, under cover of such secrecy or camouflage as might be necessary for the success of the operation.”190 Franke-Gricksch would vanish into the Soviet Union after slipping behind the Iron Curtain, but Yockey managed to create an inner circle out of his contacts with the Bruderschaft, which he named the European Liberation Front (ELF).
According to its cofounder Anthony Gannon, “We knew there was NO chance of a mass movement succeeding in the prevailing political/economic situation at that time, or of the near or midterm future.”191 The ELF instead sought to “take direct action against American bases in England,” destabilizing liberal democracy and bringing about a revolution from below based on culture rather than civilization.192 The ELF’s main propaganda document, the 1948 Declaration of London (actually published in 1949 and written in Belgium), rejected NATO and US involvement in Europe while holding out hope for Russia, where “Western Culture is an instinct, an Idea.”193
Yockey’s Satanic Brood
In the United States, several of Yockey’s followers would finance and lead the National Renaissance Party (NRP) toward a pseudo-left fascist position in hopes that Stalinism would ultimately lead the world to fascism. Among the riffraff involved in the formation of the NRP were a New Yorker named James H. Madole and a German-American named Frederick Charles Weiss. The two promoted the NRP by declaring that “what Hitler did in Europe, the National Renaissance Party intends to do in America.”194 Madole practiced a syncretic occultism that combined Madame Blavatsky’s theosophist ideas with Aleister Crowley’s “magick,” developing a bond between Satanism and the fascist occult that scholar Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke notes “anticipated the pagan alliances of neo-Nazis and Satanists in the 1990s.”195
For some fascists attempting to creep back from oblivion after the war, Satanism appeared to be a viable link to protofascist foundations. Satanism retained a connection to the pagan revival and occult milieu, which included Theosophism, Ariosophism, Crowley’s cult (the Ordo Templi Orientis), and the Germanenorden, a secretive, nationalist cult with chapters extant throughout Germany. The latter included a small Bavarian chapter known as the Thule Society, from which many of the high ranking members of the Nazi Party had once emerged. Gazing through the looking glass at the components that comprised a kind of early fascist model, the spiritual element appeared to Madole and others as indispensable.
Madole’s syncretic Satanist ideology was repeated by others decades later. One such descendant was the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF). With a name derived from Yockey’s European Liberation Front, the NSLF had splintered from the National Socialist White People’s Party in 1974. Led by a long-haired, pot-smoking Nazi named Joseph Charles Tommasi, the NSLF advocated violence against the “Jewish power structure” and published propaganda including a famous poster of a shadowy, cocked revolver and the line “The future belongs to the few of us still willing to get our hands dirty—Political Terror—it’s the only thing they understand.”196 Tommasi’s overarching goal was to create chaos and bring down the “System,” causing a race war and the eventual “liberation” of the white race.197 Like leftists, the group advocated armed struggle from a working-class perspective—the major difference was the anti-Semitic and racist messaging. Also like most leftist groups at the time, Tommasi’s Front had little effect and fell apart in short order.
Yet Tommasi’s legacy lasted. A ninth-grade dropout and longtime Nazi named James Nolan Mason revived the NSLF to launch a guerrilla war against what he identified as the Zionist Occupation Government. Reviving Tommasi’s vintage 1960s national socialist organ, Siege, Mason spread the militant message of “armed struggle” against the “System” through bombings, assassinations, and murders of racially mixed couples. Mason became increasingly fascinated with the occult, Satanism, and especially Charles Manson. As we will see, Mason’s continuation of Satanist national socialism would go on to influence an important developing subculture within the fascist movement, one that combined disillusionment with Christianity and the notion of a powerful, elitist individual whose cruelty elevates him above the herd and enables him to exploit, conquer, and reign at will.198
Asatru and Odinism
Neither the ecstatic
