Charles Synyard (@CharlesSynyard)

Epic enough bookmark? At over a hundred pages into the Centennial Edition of Francis Parker Yockey’s Imperium, a few thoughts. The first time through Imperium was probably a better pace, reading it more like it was written. I was on a vacation of sorts and undistracted, averaging fifty pages a day in undisturbed reading. It was inspiring! Now, alas, I find even my free time divided between many volumes, so I’m lucky to get in one section a day; mercifully for busy readers, and the contemporary attention span, the sections are often five or six pages each. This time around, the read is rather deflating. Counter-Currents has thoroughly documented Yockey’s influences, and chief among these is A Cultural History of the Modern Age, by Egon Friedell. Unfortunately, Imperium often so lean on Cultural History that it amounts to plagiarism, and the footnotes present the originals on which some seemingly learned passages are based. This removes a great deal of the appeal; the reader wants to think that, for instance, name-dropping Nägeli and Wiesmann reveals the author’s intimate familiarity with the history of science, not that he was just copying someone else’s list (74-75). Willis Carto, in his stirring Introduction, is also caught in an exaggeration; the US Attorney involved in railroading Yockey is claimed to have left his family and joined a monastery, whereas in fact he merely became a clergyman in the Episcopal Church (xxxii). But while much of the name-dropping and historical development is Friedell’s, the philosophical evaluations are Yockey’s. Recently found a passage I’d remembered from my first read. ”To Darwinism, a Gothic cathedral is a product of mechanical evolution, to Marx it is an attempt of the bourgeois to trick the proletariat, to Freud it is a piece of frozen sexuality.” (89) As regards Freud, I’m also now reading Sex and Culture, by J. D. Unwin, which takes a more positive view of the pioneering psychologist, building its thesis on his ideas about how repressed sexuality is spent in other directions. In the Editor’s Preface, Greg Johnson speculates on why Yockey didn’t own up to his immense debts to Friedell, and puts forward that, Friedell being a Jew (albeit a longtime convert to Christianity), it might have made Yockey look worse with his core audience. Another possibility is that it might have saved Friedell some posthumous embarrassment. Looking him up, I was surprised to see he was an actor, who can still be seen in the get-up for performances on stage. Per Wikipedia, while he, too, was influenced by Yockey’s idol, Oswald Spengler, he deplored the National Socialists, who frowned on his works, and died dramatically jumping from an upper story when two SA agents came to arrest him. As Yockey thought the Third Reich an attempt to realize the destined imperium stage of civilization, for him Friedell’s strings of facts and historical perspective obviously fit into a different framework. Yockey probably knew Friedell was “rolling around in his grave,” providing the backbone to his pro-NatSoc tome; why rub it in? So, after reading Yockey, will it be time for Friedell? I am impressed with his style and erudition—no doubt helped along by being rendered into English by Spengler’s translator, Charles Francis Atkinson—but dispirited to find that his Cultural History of the Modern Age is rare and expensive in the original printings, and ugly in modern reprints. I could only even find one pic of all three volumes together, these ex libris ones in a stack. Attractive title page, too. Time for a more worthy reprint? First pic is Friedell, second is my favorite of the never-before-published ones at the back of the Centennial Imperium, Yockey on a road trip out west in 1950. Staring out over a wide valley, just as he stares over the whole sweep of West-European history and destiny. #FrancisParkerYockey #Imperium #WillisCarto #CounterCurrents #EgonFriedell #ACulturalHistoryOfTheModernAge #Jews #plagiarism #SigmundFreud #Freud #Freudianism #Darwinism #Marxism #NatSoc #culture #westernculture #WesternCivilization #West #philosophy #history #books