CONCEALED INFLUENCE FRANCIS PARKER YOCKEY S …Schmitt, is a sphere of life that is in certain...

CONCEALED INFLUENCE: FRANCIS PARKER YOCKEY’S PLAGIARISM OF

CARL SCHMITT

SEBASTIAN LINDERHOF1

________________________

“The errors of great men are worthy of honour because they are more fruitful than the truths of the small.” — Nietzsche2

INTRODUCTION: BENEATH IMPERIUM It is immediately apparent to any reader of Imperium that Francis

Parker Yockey was a student and disciple of the work of Oswald Spengler. What is far less well known is that Yockey was also enorm-ously influenced by the German political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985). Although Schmitt does not appear in the index and is nowhere mentioned by name in Imperium, Yockey employed his ideas throughout Imperium and plagiarized extensively from Schmitt’s work.

The objective of the present essay is neither to condemn nor to ex-culpate Yockey for his plagiarism of Schmitt. The purpose is rather to reveal and document the nature and extent of this plagiarism, as well as to provide the kind of introduction to Carl Schmitt’s political ideas that is necessary for an understanding of Yockey’s appropriation of Schmitt. I leave it for the reader to pass judgment on Yockey, whether favorably or unfavorably, and I proceed on the basis of the assump-tion that it is better to know and disseminate the truth than to conceal it, even when the truth is not as we would wish it to be. Yockey was a complex figure and if we are to understand him, it is our duty to con-sider and investigate all of the available information. It is doubtless unfortunate that a man of such brilliance and passionate devotion to the cause of European survival and flourishing plagiarized another

1 I would like to thank Greg Johnson and Edmund Connelly for their interest in

the present work, and I thank Andrew Hamilton for extensively commenting on an earlier draft of it.

2 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Schopenhauer.” In Christopher Janaway (Ed.), Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 260.

The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 4, Winter 2010–2011

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man’s work, and that he plagiarized so extensively. Yet Yockey did so in the service of a book which, as one author has commented, was not intended (despite its breadth and erudition) as an academic treatise.3

Furthermore, the ideas that Yockey plagiarized and appropriated from Schmitt are of great interest in their own right, as I also hope to demonstrate.

WHO WAS CARL SCHMITT? Who was this hidden influence on Yockey’s thought and on Impe-

rium? Why would Yockey have been attracted to Carl Schmitt’s ideas? In the two sections that follow, I will try to answer these questions by providing a brief outline of Schmitt’s most significant political idea and its consequences. In so doing I hope to make clear why Schmitt’s thought is valuable for the cause of European survival and flourish-ing.

Schmitt is a paradoxical figure, a Catholic thinker whose principal political legacy was the formulation of a particularistic doctrine of pol-itics conceived as hostility and antagonism, and a jurist who both at-tempted to prevent the National Socialists from coming to power4 and who later joined the NSDAP in May of 1933,5

3 “Yockey wrote Imperium not as a logical argument but a kind of prose poem

which would articulate the inner feelings of what he called ‘Europe’s elite.’” Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 1999), 80.

the same month as did Martin Heidegger. A revival of interest in Schmitt’s work today has largely been conducted by academic Marxists who hope to use Schmitt’s thinking to shore up their own anti-globalism and who evi-dently believe that Schmitt’s anti-liberalism can be detached from his rightist political sympathies and strongly anti-universalist worldview,

4 Schmitt opposed the National Socialists before 1933 and hoped to see them kept from power because he believed that their involvement in government would either lead to greater German instability or that their rule would be disastrous for Germa-ny in the long run, which, of course, it was.

5 There is a prosaic academic debate over the extent to which Schmitt had been a “political opportunist” in his embrace of the Nazis once they achieved political power and supremacy in Germany. While there is likely some truth in this conten-tion, it was also surely the case that beginning in 1933 Schmitt saw the Nazis as the new political dispensation, as those who would — and, for at least six years, did — bring order, prosperity, and stability to Germany. That they put an end to the polit-ical power of liberals and Communists, both of which groups Schmitt detested as de facto internal enemies of Germany, also probably favorably disposed him to the Nazi regime.

Linderhof, “Concealed Influence”

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and thereby used to promote leftist political objectives. To read the Marxist interpretation and exposition of Schmitt,6 one would think that Schmitt was not very different from today’s neo-Marxists, an im-pression which could not be further from the truth. There are, to be sure, aspects of Schmitt’s political thought that may be perceived by some as “leftist,” but most of these are features of Schmitt’s thought that prefigure the worldview of the European New Right and only appear leftist in an American political context, one in which “the right” is primarily libertarian in orientation.7

There is a sterile and generally tendentious debate about Schmitt among leftist and left-leaning “liberal” academics over the extent to which Schmitt was sincerely a Nazi or whether he was a kind of “po-litical opportunist,” but this should only briefly detain us. The parties to the debate consist, on the one hand, of the aforementioned Marxists who wish to “use” Schmitt for their own ends and who therefore have to provide a minimal “defense” of his ideas and, on the other hand, left-leaning liberal-progressive academics who loathe Schmitt because of his eventual support for and involvement with the Nazis.

Suffice to say that Schmitt was a man of the right and no Marxist.

8 This is essentially a debate internal to the parochial and paranoid world of contemporary academia, which almost exclusively consists of egalita-rians and those deeply hostile to European ethnic and cultural inter-ests. The debate hangs on whether Schmitt “sincerely” embraced Na-tional Socialism — for if he did, he is ipso facto evil from the stand-point of the leftist academy.9

6 Prominent Marxist advocates of Schmitt include editors of the journal Telos and

the Indian-American academic Gopal Balakrishnan. Balakrishnan is an editor of the British neo-Marxist publication, New Left Review.

The ideological appropriation or con-demnation of Schmitt by contemporary academics dominates dis-

7 See Alain de Benoist, “The European New Right Forty Years Later: Tomislav Sunic’s Against Democracy and Equality,” The Occidental Quarterly 9(1) (Spring 2009), 62–63.

8 Schmitt fell into disrepute with the German government in 1936, after the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps published an exposé revealing Schmitt’s pre-1933 stance against the Nazis. After this ordeal he kept a relatively low profile for the duration of the regime, primarily publishing on international affairs in the years after 1936.

9 Some of Schmitt’s “liberal/progressive” critics have therefore unsurprisingly called Schmitt a thinker who supposedly embraced evil. Nonetheless, “liberal” and leftist academics never hesitate to speak favorably of Marxist intellectuals who praise or advocate atrocities perpetrated by brutal Marxist dictatorships. This double-standard is central to the identity of the academy today.


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course on his thought in the academy today, and there are accordingly very few who write favorably of Schmitt from a position not hostile to his own.10 Yet one of the early exponents of Schmitt for an English-speaking audience was in fact Occidental Quarterly contributor Tomis-lav Sunic. In his 1988 doctoral dissertation and the subsequent book based on it, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right11

, Sunic features an excellent discussion of Schmitt’s influence on the European New Right. This is a far more useful and honest explication than that found in the work of today’s academic Marxists and “pro-gressives.” The American paleo-conservative Paul Gottfried, author of an important monograph on Schmitt, is, along with Sunic, one of the very few to write about Schmitt in English from a non-Marxist standpoint on the political right — to write of him neither to condemn nor to (mis)appropriate.

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES: RELATIONS WITH THE ‘OTHER’ It is vital to have an understanding of Schmitt’s ideas in order to

understand Yockey’s plagiarism and appropriation of them. There is also much in Schmitt’s thought, shorn of distorting and ideologically motivated contemporary “interpretations,” that would be of interest to Occidental Quarterly readers in its own right. I therefore turn next to an outline of Schmitt’s most significant idea — the idea that unifies his thought — and its consequences. Significantly, Schmitt’s most com-pelling and considerable contribution to political thought is also the theory that figures most prominently in Yockey’s plagiarism of Schmitt and is therefore central to understanding it. This is the theory that Schmitt calls the “friend/enemy distinction.” Schmitt held that politics was a sphere of human life that could only be understood in terms of the relation between friends and enemies, between groups either aligned together or against each other. Politics, according to Schmitt, is a sphere of life that is in certain respects akin to other areas

10 On the list of works about Schmitt by those close to him politically there is also

a recent work of Alain de Benoist, Carl Schmitt Actuel (2007), which is not discussed in this essay. The European New Right’s reception of Schmitt has not surprisingly embraced many aspects of his thought shunned by most of his (Marxist) supporters and (liberal) critics alike, though the New Right generally opposes Schmitt’s unapo-logetic statism.

11 The work was originally a doctoral dissertation and later published as a book in 1990 and 2004. The 2004 version of Sunic’s book: Tomislav Sunic, Against Democ-racy and Equality: The European New Right (Newport Beach: Noontide Press, 2004).


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of life in being organized around a characteristic dichotomy exclusive to it, such as the dichotomies between good and evil in morality and that between beautiful and ugly in aesthetics. But the dichotomy cha-racteristic of politics, the dichotomy between friends and enemies, is a distinction that does not have any relation to other distinctions; in the same way, morality and aesthetics, for example, play no role in poli-tics as Schmitt understands it. Any attempt to make political divisions (to determine enemies) on the basis of moral norms or ethical theories is an illegitimate and, in Schmitt view, absurd moralization of politics whose source is the idea that moral norms are more significant in poli-tics than the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the peoples involved. According to Schmitt, such normative fictions are certainly much less important than whether groups are similar or dissimilar.

Schmitt maintained that this relation between friends and enemies is fundamental to politics, is unavoidable, and is determined by the “intensity” of the constitutive differences between different groups: “The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of in-tensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissocia-tion….The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the clos-er it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.”12 This intensity is a function of the “otherness” of the enemy and in order for a group to be a true enemy this “otherness” must be sufficiently intense that conflict and war is possible with him13

Friend/enemy antitheses are public relations, such that “[i]n its en-tirety the state as an organized political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction.”

as a result of the intensity of his difference. War and conflict are therefore important factors in understanding Schmitt’s political dis-tinction, but they do not have to be common or normal. War simply must be possible on the basis of the stark and insurmountable differ-ences between groups — on the basis of the “otherness” of each group to each other — in order for true friend and enemy relations to exist.

14

12 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, Expanded Edition (Chicago and Lon-

don: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 26, 29.

Above all, because they are predicated

13 Referring to the enemy here in the third-person singular (“him”) is merely lite-rary license; for Schmitt, the enemy is always a public enemy, a group, as will be ex-plained shortly. Schmitt engages in a similar use of the third-person singular in his consideration of enemies.

14 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 29–30.


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on sameness or difference between groups, friend/enemy antitheses are not based on moral or normative considerations, relations of eco-nomic interdependence or competition, or any other factor aside from the “otherness” of the enemy:

[The enemy] is…the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially some-thing different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible….Only the actual participants can correct-ly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a posi-tion to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his oppo-nent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence.15

The above passage moreover helpfully illustrates the way in which Schmitt insists that each political “participant” must determine whether its adversary is in fact an enemy, i.e., whether its adversary “intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence.” It would be difficult to find a more succinct statement of the position that identity and culture are politically — and therefore existentially — zero-sum games. Those who negate our identity must be “repulsed or fought” in order to secure the survival of the group and its way of life.

The friend/enemy thesis is Schmitt’s fundamental political axiom (he refers to it as a “criterion”) and it is clear in Imperium that it is Yockey’s as well, as will be demonstrated below. Although it may in-

15 Schmitt’s entire passage reads as follows: “The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These [conflicts] can neither be de-cided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinte-rested and therefore neutral third party. Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in or-der to preserve one’s own form of existence” Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 27. This is one of the passages Yockey plagiarized, as will be shown below.


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itially appear quite straightforward or even simplistic, the friend/enemy thesis runs directly counter to almost all political think-ing — both theoretical and practical — developed in the West since the Enlightenment and this is the source of both its power and its in-terest. It runs counter to Enlightenment political thinking in its unre-lenting contention that the basis of political association and political conflict is not found in the realm of ideas or in morality, but rather in tangible facts about the relevant peoples and their cultures, its corol-lary that a world without conflict is impossible, and that the belief in such a world is motivated by naïve and misguided utopianism. Like much of the best “reactionary” thought of the past two centuries, the friend/enemy distinction, while quite original in its specific formula-tion and in its stark directness, consists to some degree of reminding Europeans, accustomed as they are to false and abstract modes of thought, of a basic feature of human life that most peoples (including pre-modern Europeans) have always known and have not forgotten, and which has therefore been left unsaid in many cultures.16 The claim, common in the academic literature today,17 that Schmitt’s for-mulation of the friend/enemy distinction is “radical”18

16 One is reminded of Orwell’s remark that “We have now sunk to a depth at

which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” To the best of my knowledge, no one in the history of China has ever had to formulate an argument to defend the obvious fact that men and women are different by nature. But precisely because of the depths to which our culture has sunk, such arguments are now necessary.

is in some

17 Another common interpretation of the friend/enemy distinction is that it is an early twentieth-century expression of “political realism.” While he was certainly a ‘realist,’ broadly construed (in the sense of being anti-utopian and realistic about human nature and politics), Schmitt is very different from those who have come to be known as “realists” in the study of international relations and world politics. Much has been made of the connection between Schmitt and the Jewish “political realist” Hans Morgenthau, but Schmitt’s concerns are considerably removed from those of Morgenthau and his students and intellectual descendents in the academy. Morgenthau and academic “realists” are concerned primarily with the study of power, interest, and security in the relations among states, but they are not interest-ed in the kind of people or cultures that inhabit these states. Like most contempo-rary academics, they assume that the kind of people inhabiting a given state is an unimportant and trivial phenomenon. They therefore maintain that conflictual rela-tionships between states are not generated by differences between peoples and their cultures, but are instead the product solely of relations of power and interest.

18 Any attempt to remind contemporary Europeans of what they once knew is now typically considered “radical.” Indeed, the very notion that an idea is “radical” or “extreme” (as should be obvious) is entirely relative to time and place, as is the


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measure an indication of this fact. Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction is an original, effective, and parsimonious way to understand and represent fundamental features and facts about political — and there-fore human — relations. But there is nothing “radical” about it, unless one sees it (and the world) through the distorting cultural Marxist lens of the contemporary academy.

Despite the ideologically motivated interpretations of Marxist scho-larship, it is fairly clear that what Schmitt generally means by ‘friends’ are ethno-cultural and national groups that have ethnicity and culture in common, and that what he means by ‘enemies’ are ethno-cultural and national groups that do not have ethnicity and culture in com-mon. On this reading of Schmitt, enemies thereby differ from friends in the degree to which they are ethnically and culturally different and alien. Schmitt did not express his ideas in precisely these terms, but alternate interpretations are hardly persuasive. What else could he have meant by the ‘otherness’ of enemies? What other kind of ‘other-ness’ is there that Schmitt has not already ruled out? He is quite clear that friend-enemy relations are not to be determined by moral norms or ideology, such that ideologically motivated differences are typically insufficient.19

opposed notion of an idea’s being “respectable.” What is now considered “radical” or “extreme” was, a hundred years ago, generally considered common sense and self-evidently true, while most of what today is deemed “respectable” was consi-dered perverse, immoral, and contrary to nature a hundred years ago.

What else besides ethnicity, culture, and dissimilar

19 Nonetheless, Schmitt does allow that such ideological differences may in some cases be sufficient to group people into opposing camps as friends and enemies (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 37–39). Yet Schmitt also appears to indicate that if such differences do group people as friends and enemies, it is more than likely that ideology is not the only difference between the groups in question. Underlying differences of a different and more fundamental nature are probably the root cause of such friend-enemy relations. The architects of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union must have had a reasonably good grasp of this state of affairs. They surely knew that ideological differences would be insufficient to create lasting friend-enemy distinctions and antipathies. Both cosmopolitan empires there-fore attempted to portray their respective enemies as genuinely “other” in a way that they certainly were not. The average European American living in the 1950s surely had no idea how much he had in common with the average Russian living in the Soviet Union. There is therefore a sense in which duplicitous governments can employ ideological propaganda to manufacture friend-enemy relations by misrepre-senting other states as “others” and “strangers” that actually are not very different at all. Of course, this strategy has also been abetted by Western government propa-ganda directed at Europeans and European Americans intended to undermine their


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ways of life20 — and, of course, religion, which I here subsume under ‘culture’ — is typically strong enough to make one group perceive another as “the other, the stranger…[as being] in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible”?21

Reference was just made to a difference that does indeed appear to be ideological — that between Schmitt and his liberal opponents. Yet there is a sense in which this difference masks a deeper division, pre-cisely inasmuch as those who today describe themselves as “liberal” and “progressive” are deracinated, hostile to the ethnic interests of their own people, or both. In other words, behind the apparently ideological difference between Schmitt and contemporary liberals lies

While his Marxist enthusiasts do not typically care for this interpretation, it is worth noting that Schmitt’s liberal-progressive critics think it highly plausible, therefore employing it as part of their “critique” of Schmitt. Yet their shrill and hostile denunciation of Schmitt for his belief that the world is com-posed of enemies without common ground or the possibility of com-promise is both unintentionally ironic and self-defeating, and itself provides evidence for Schmitt’s view.

sense of being a group in the first place, of being friends in Schmitt’s terminology. One is in no position to determine enemies based on authentic criteria of “other-ness” if one does not have an authentic understanding of “sameness” — of who one’s own group is.

20 It is important to emphasize that I make no attempt to portray Schmitt as an explicitly racialist thinker. He was not a racialist. The friend enemy distinction is not a distinction based primarily on race, racial differences, or cultural divisions predicated on racial differences, though it can certainly be employed in this manner, as it was by Yockey. Instead, racial differences, like ethnic and cultural differences, are phenomena that generate “otherness,” when considered from the standpoint of Schmitt’s theory. Racial differences are therefore central to an understanding of real world friend-enemy antitheses, especially in an increasingly “globalized” world. Schmitt himself thought largely in terms of competing European nation-states (in-cluding their associated cultures and ways of life) and their world of power politics; it should therefore come as little surprise that his own understanding of ‘otherness’ was based far more on a consideration of intra-European ethnic and cultural differ-ences than it was on racial differences. Nonetheless, it is hardly mere counter-factual speculation to assert that if the friend-enemy distinction applies to and en-compasses the otherness that exists between, say, Germans and Russians, then it applies to an even greater degree to the radical otherness that exists between Euro-peans and, say, Africans. After all, there is no greater degree of otherness in the real world than that which exists between members of different races.

21 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 27.


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a deeper and more fundamental difference between those who wish to promote the good of their particular human group and those who oppose the good of this group.22 While this is different from the dis-similarity that exists between one ethno-cultural group and a radically different ethno-cultural group, it can be understood in analogous terms because what is of ultimate importance for Schmitt is the pre-servation of a group’s way of life. Those who oppose a group’s way of life, whether they are members of the group who oppose their own group’s way of life or members of a radically different group whose very difference is itself a negation, are the group’s enemies. In no longer recognizing their own group as friends and the enemies of their own group as enemies, they have in fact joined with the enemy against their own group. Of this Schmitt has the following to say: “If a part of the population declares that it no longer recognizes enemies, then, depending on the circumstance, it joins their side and aids them.”23

Yet Schmitt’s argument about those who do not recognize enemies can also be employed in other and perhaps more startling ways. In not recognizing our real enemies, many who would otherwise appear to be our friends reveal themselves not only to be profoundly mis-guided, but, in fact, to be our enemies and to thereby effectively join our principal enemies in their war against us. The concept of enemy may therefore be more fundamental than the concept of friend. It is in this sense that the concept of enemy may be employed as a kind of clarifying litmus test about a given state, group, or movement. What-ever else may be the case about a given state, group, or movement, it is likely that who it considers its enemy is most important to an un-derstanding of it. However much it may appear that they are our friends, those who do not recognize the real enemies of Europeans must therefore be considered enemies. Those who do not recognize the real enemies of Europeans must also be considered incredibly foo-lish, as they are almost certainly doomed to failure.

Liberals are thus quite literally the enemy of their own people.

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22 This category includes those who are not aware that they oppose their own

group. In most such cases, those who oppose their own group have explicitly cho-sen not to identify with this group. Yet this does nothing to lessen their status as enemies of their own group.

23 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 51. 24 In this category I would include, for example, a group such as the “paleo-

conservatives.”


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In the spirit of Schmitt, Yockey recognizes and emphasizes how critical it is to choose wisely and to oppose real enemies in Imperium when he writes the following particularly illuminating passage: “Thus we have seen again the existential nature of organic alternatives: a unit can either fight a real enemy, or it must lose. And again, a unit not fighting a real enemy is in the service of another power—there is no middle ground. If a unit is not fighting for itself, it is fighting against itself.”25 Despite his plagiarism of Schmitt, this is a legitimate and insightful application of Schmitt’s ideas, which captures an essen-tial truth about friends and enemies.26

We may conclude that those who do not recognize our real enemies may in fact be in the service of these enemies, or, at the very least, in the service of some other power. Yockey writes, “But regardless of why a politician chooses for an enemy a unit which was not a real enemy, the fact remains that in so doing he is abdicating the sove-reignty of his State and placing it therewith in the service of another state.”

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Let us return specifically to an explication of Schmitt’s thought. As should now be clear, Schmitt placed great emphasis on the preserva-tion of a group’s way of life. As a result, he argued that only the de-fense of a community’s way of life justifies war.

Those who do not choose real enemies as their enemies re-veal their subjection to another power, while those subject to another power reveal their subjection in not choosing real enemies as their enemies.

28 Nonetheless, the friend-enemy distinction is typically read today as an attack on the ostensible liberal idea that the entire world can be made friends,29

25 Yockey, Imperium, 151.

and that politics, understood as the competition and antagonism between competing powers, can be consigned to history. Marxists seem to fa-vor it because of their own ideological emphasis on conflict and con-tradictions, which they chastise liberals for ignoring. Marxists do in-deed believe in conflict, but unlike Marxists, Schmitt did not consider

26 Another example of Yockey’s interesting application and adaptation of Schmitt’s ideas is considered in some detail in the section below, “Yockey’s Appro-priation of Schmitt.”

27 Yockey, Imperium, 149. 28 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 49. 29 “Ostensible” because while this notion features strongly in liberal rhetoric and

political philosophy, it may in fact mask a clandestine agenda. Schmitt was certain-ly aware of this possibility, as will be noted shortly.


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conflict a function of exploitative class relationships or unresolved contradictions. It is certainly true that Schmitt was indeed hostile to the liberal position (or rhetorical strategy) that all nations and states can be friends, to the extent that this is in fact a genuine liberal goal. Schmitt was a shrewd man who also countenanced the idea that libe-ralism’s claim of “friendship” for all humanity and for the world was in fact disingenuous, and that it masked a far more insidious agenda of global domination and the elimination of all human and political heterogeneity.

Whatever the case may be, the aspect of Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction that is arguably most significant and yet typically most neglected today is precisely the ethno-nationalist dimension. Despite the Marxist attempt to tame and co-opt him, Schmitt clearly believed that some groups would generally and naturally be friends and some groups typically enemies, and that these divisions would more often than not emerge on the basis of ethnicity and culture. Schmitt also recognized the existence of what he called “internal” or “domestic” enemies and understood them in similar terms as those who are alien or other, rightly emphasizing that healthy states cannot long survive intact with the existence of such internal and potentially subversive groups.30

Schmitt argued that a people has a right to exist as a people and that the defense of a people, its culture, and its way of life justifies war; in fact, Schmitt held that such war was the only justifiable kind of war, as all other justifications for war are either moral claptrap or propa-ganda on behalf of elites or industry.

31 It is quite clear that one of the principal targets of Schmitt’s attack on “moral” justifications for war (what is now misleadingly and hypocritically called “just war” theory) is an intoxication with precisely the kind of abstractions that Europeans have come since the Enlightenment to believe more impor-tant than ethnic, cultural, racial, and national affiliations.32

30 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 46.

Obviously,

31 Schmitt writes, “To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy” (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 48). This is in fact one of the passages plagiarized by Yockey, as will be shown below.

32 This is an objection repeatedly raised in The Occidental Quarterly, and rightly so, as the infatuation with moral abstractions at the expense of ethnic interests and soli-darity might with justification be called the “sickness of the West.” Two recent and


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this is an idea that the political left has no use for, and it is generally either ignored in leftist commentaries on Schmitt, or else an attempt is made to defuse it with the irrelevant claim that Schmitt rejected race as a strictly biological concept.33

As a result, one of Schmitt’s most important ideas hardly features in the secondary literature, especially the literature in English. Schmitt repeatedly emphasizes that moral and normative abstractions are meaningless apart from a substantive relation to a people, and, more to the point, that they are insignificant, trivial, and misleading when applied in relations to other groups. For Schmitt, a group de-fines itself in essentially Hegelian terms by what it is not and it is this otherness, the alien nature, of other groups that are other-than-your group which is most important about the other group — and, indeed, about your group. Whatever moral or immoral qualities another people — an other — possess is therefore irrelevant,

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Above all, there is no universal norm that applies to all groups, one which can be applied to one group vis-à-vis another group and there-

and whether they are economically advantageous or disadvantageous to one’s own group is also irrelevant.

forceful examples of this kind of critique are found in George Hocking’s “Ethnic Hegemonies in American History” (Vol. 9, No. 1: Spring 2009) and Sam G. Dickson’s “Salus Populi Lex Suprema” (Vol. 8, No. 3: Fall 2008).

33 Yockey also rejected race as a strictly biological concept. 34 Whether one personally has affection for members of an alien group is irrele-

vant, as is the question of whether this group is deemed moral by our internal stan-dards. What matters, according to Schmitt, is that the group is an other. This is of course how nearly all peoples have always thought, historically and contemporarily, but since the Enlightenment, Europeans have rejected such thinking as excessively “particularistic” — a stern rebuke in the context of our universalistic public culture. At all events, that they are “other” is perhaps all that we can meaningfully and justi-fiably say about those who are radically different from us. To declare that another group is “beautiful,” “ugly,” “moral,” “immoral,” etc. is to apply our internal stan-dards to an external group. What may appear as the extremely immoral behavior of other groups when judged by our European standards of morality and from the standpoint of our internal perspective surely appears quite different when judged by the (ethnocentric) standards of the offending group in question and from its own internal standpoint. A Nietzschean perspective is useful when dealing with such matters: the wolf’s behavior seems obviously “immoral” from the standpoint of the lamb, but does not appear so from the standpoint of the wolf. Precisely to the de-gree that a group is alien, is genuinely other, our standards should not be assumed to apply to them, and Schmitt rightly rejects ostensibly “universal” norms as inap-propriate and inapplicable to politics and to the political relations between peoples.


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by arbitrate between them and “objectively” decide whether a war is “morally justified.” According to Schmitt, only the collective defense of a people and its way of life justifies war. Why? Because a people and its way of life are of the greatest importance for that people. There is no “agent-neutral” perspective in such matters and certainly no im-partial ground from which to adjudicate competing claims and de-mands. One is either on one side (as a member of one group) or one is on the other side (as a member of an opposing group); i.e., one is ei-ther friend or enemy. This is all that one can legitimately say, and Schmitt repeatedly reminds us of this basic condition of human af-fairs.

It should come as little surprise that Schmitt was therefore adamant in his rejection of the liberal universalist fiction of “humanity,”35 which he referred to as “an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion.”36

35 Above all, Schmitt deplored the liberal belief that its embrace of “humanity,”

which is itself an indication that liberals are enemies of their own people, would ul-timately lead to a world without conflict and therefore the elimination of all friend-enemy distinctions. Schmitt offers the following sobering thought to those who adopt such insidiously utopian notions: “[A] people [cannot] hope to bring about a purely moral or purely economic condition of humanity by evading every political decision. If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear” (Ibid. 53) (emphasis added).

There is nothing that binds all of “humani-ty” together and the notion that the concept of humanity has moral or normative force is another Enlightenment delusion that only Euro-peans believe and support. If intractable lines of division exist be-tween friends and enemies, and if these divisions are generally a re-sult of the otherness of groups when placed in relation to one another, it is incoherent to speak of “humanity.” There are only friends and enemies. The rest of putative “humanity” has always known this but

36 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 54. Schmitt deplored the ideological use of the rhetoric of “humanity” by “liberal” states, especially those who sought to un-iversalize their own particular enemies into “objective” international “criminals,” guilty of “crimes against humanity,” and therefore putatively to be despised by all. Schmitt writes that “War is condemned but executions, sanctions, punitive expedi-tions, pacifications, protection of treaties, international police, and measures to as-sure peace remain. The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity. A war waged to protect or expand economic power must, with the aid of propaganda, turn into a crusade and into the last war of humanity” (Ibid., 79).


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Europeans have forgotten it, along with nearly every other truth they once knew.

Schmitt was wholly opposed to individualism in all its forms, and he is often accused (by ‘liberals,’ of course) of fostering an “us vs. them” frame of mind. This is indeed true, and precisely to the degree that this aspect of his thought is upsetting to liberals, it is clear that Schmitt was right to do so. The wholesale and widespread adoption of just such an “us vs. them” outlook is currently our only hope for survival as Europeans, for survival as a people. It is the pathological inability to distinguish between friend and enemy that has led Euro-peans to the deracinated, dispossessed, and increasingly powerless status they occupy in the world today.

The stubborn belief that there are no enemies in a world composed primarily of enemies, the obstinate delusion that those who repeated-ly demonstrate malice towards us and wish us harm are our friends, and the irrational yet implacable conviction that our values apply to all and will be respected by others in their dealings with us37

Schmitt is the ideal antidote to the hopelessly idealistic — and ex-clusively European — delusion that there are no enemies, either inter-nally or externally. These unfortunate mental afflictions, lamentably characteristic of modern Europeans, stem from an entrenched inability to perceive the world as it actually is — a world of friends and ene-mies in which most friendships and hostilities are ultimately grounded as Schmitt believed they were,

reveal that Schmitt has much to teach Europeans and European Americans about why such beliefs are grotesquely mistaken and ultimately fatal. After all, one cannot win a war if one does not know who one’s ene-mies are or, indeed, if one foolishly believes that one’s enemies are ac-tually friends. And one surely cannot win a war if one does not even know that a war is taking place.

38 in bonds of ethno-cultural kinship or ethno-cultural otherness.39

37 The belief that other groups think and act precisely as we do is one of the un-

fortunate consequences of the groundless European faith in universalism. It is natu-rally easy to believe that your group’s norms apply universally if you first wrongly assume that other people will find them as compelling as your own group does.

38 Many liberal critics of Schmitt treat this as if it were the kind of world he hoped for, rather than the kind of world he perceived around him. Suffice to say that Schmitt was a realist who believed that he was providing an accurate analysis of human social and political relations. Nonetheless, Schmitt certainly did not be-lieve in the kind of trans-cultural hyper-objectivity sought by contemporary social


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YOCKEY ENCOUNTERS SCHMITT The present article is not the first to notice Yockey’s plagiarism of

Carl Schmitt. In his long and unwieldy book, Dreamer of the Day: Fran-cis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, Kevin Coogan writes that “in Imperium, Yockey freely plagiarized from Schmitt.”40

scientists, the results of whose research, not surprisingly, almost always support the establishment and its status quo. He would surely have dismissed such faux “re-search” as merely another misguided consequence of indiscriminate universalism, illustrated by contemporary social science’s basic assumption that results obtained in studying one group of people can unproblematically be assumed to hold for and to apply to all other groups, irrespective of race, ethnicity, and culture. While he was not particularly interested in research on race, Schmitt rejected the view that all peoples and cultures are “essentially” the same and that culture is merely a superfi-cial surface phenomenon, the cardinal precept of today’s hegemonic cultural Marx-ism. For Schmitt, a culture is constitutive of the identity of its group, expresses who a people is, and must be defended as an inalienable part of a people itself.

While this is certainly true, Coogan entirely understates the full extent of Yockey’s plagiarism of Schmitt and only cites and seems aware of a few plagiarized passages. Coogan moreover seems strangely uninte-rested in Yockey’s plagiarism, which he explains was brought to his attention by Thomas Francis, the translator of Yockey’s The Enemy of

39 One palpable result of applying abstract concepts to politics is the emergence of bizarre, superficial, and ephemeral friend/enemy groupings that are easily mani-pulated by elites. The most obvious example of this is the contemporary United States, which, we are endlessly instructed, is a “creedal nation,” a state-empire not based on bonds of ethnic kinship, but a group held together by nothing more than an ostensibly shared belief in a founding document with no substantive meaning in the many decades since the ethnic group that adopted it lost its position of national dominance. It follows from the notion of a “creedal” or “propositional” nation that the average European American believes he possesses more in common with Amer-icans of African, Latin American, or Asian descent than he does with Europeans. Yet such unnatural and irrational beliefs are only maintained as the result of mental manipulation on a massive scale. Schmitt instead focuses on extreme or “limit” sit-uations precisely because the truth about the human condition and politics is often revealed in them; if Europeans and Americans were to face a truly desperate situa-tion, a ‘war of all against all,’ there is little doubt that their naïve belief that Ameri-cans are a unified “people” would quickly dissipate in a new world of violent inter-racial animosities.

40 Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 74. Coogan’s book is discursive and sprawl-ing, and despite its great length, is not particularly helpful. Coogan apparently set himself the task of understanding the entire post-War “radical right” through the lens of Yockey, and his book fails in that regard.


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Europe back into English from the anonymous German translation of Yockey’s lost original manuscript.41

There may also be plagiarism of Schmitt in Yockey’s The Enemy of Europe, but the present article focuses only on plagiarism found in Im-perium. There is plagiarism of Schmitt throughout Imperium, but the long section of the book titled “The 20

th Century Political Outlook” is most conspicuously and consistently plagiarized. This section, over one hundred and twenty pages,42

I have used George Schwab’s English translation of The Concept of the Political throughout this article.

is in fact almost entirely derived from Schmitt, such that what is not directly plagiarized is nonetheless largely lifted from Schmitt or substantially influenced by his thought. What is truly astonishing, however, are those passages plagiarized nearly word-for-word from Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, some of which are included in the section “Yockey’s Plagiarism of Schmitt” in the present article.

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41 Coogan writes in Dreamer of the Day of the differences between Francis’ specu-

lation and his own regarding possible reasons that Yockey plagiarized Schmitt: “Francis believes that Yockey may not have cited Schmitt directly because Schmitt had come under interrogation by Allied authorities for his role with the Nazis. My own feeling is that Yockey wanted to approximate Spengler’s notion of a ‘symbol’ in The Decline of the West” (Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 80). I am generally agnostic regarding Yockey’s motives, but must take exception to two claims advanced by Coogan. Coogan maintains that Yockey “wrote for an audience that he knew would recognize the ideas of a Spengler of Schmitt” (Ibid). As Schmitt’s work remained almost entirely untranslated in the late 1940s, this seems manifestly implausible, unless we presume that Yockey believed most of his readers would be German legal theorists who read English. Furthermore, and more significantly, Coogan considers Yockey’s plagiarism of Schmitt to be of no consequence, writing that “[a]lthough Yockey ‘plagiarized’ from Schmitt, the point is virtually irrelevant to a critique of Imperium, whose style was deliberately meant to be vatic and inspirational, not scho-larly” (Ibid). Coogan’s scare quotes around ‘plagiarized’ are of course inappropriate, as they give the mistaken impression that Yockey’s copying somehow falls short of genuine plagiarism. More to the point, Yockey’s plagiarism is significant and quite pertinent to an understanding of Imperium. At the very least, it reveals that Yockey greatly appreciated and was an enthusiast for Schmitt’s ideas. It further demon-strates that Yockey hoped, for whatever reason, to pass off these ideas as his own. The contrast with Yockey’s acknowledgement of Spengler’s influence on his thought is again instructive. While we may never know Yockey’s reasons for copying and employing Schmitt’s work without attribution, the matter is certainly far from insig-nificant.

Because Yockey first had to

42 Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium (1962), 121–243. 43 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political.


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translate Schmitt into English before plagiarizing him, differences be-tween Yockey and Schmitt may be even less than they appear, as a given passage in Yockey may appear to differ from Schwab’s English translation of Schmitt merely because Yockey translated the passage differently from the way Schwab later translated it. In other words, Yockey’s plagiarism is likely even more literal than it often appears below.

According to Coogan, Yockey was first exposed to Schmitt while a student at Georgetown and there became quite interested in his ideas.44 Yockey could surely have counted on the American reading public and the English-speaking world having no knowledge of Schmitt, nor would they have had the ability to discern Yockey’s pla-giarism of him. Indeed, the book from which most of Yockey’s pla-giarism originates, Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, was not trans-lated into English until 1976, nearly thirty years after the first edition of Imperium and fifteen years after Yockey’s death. It was translated by a scholar named George Schwab, who was at the time of his trans-lation the author of the only book on Carl Schmitt in English, The Chal-lenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt between 1921 and 1936, which had appeared in 1970.45 But The Chal-lenge of the Exception was published by the German publisher Duncker und Humblot (which had been Schmitt’s publisher as well), and it was to be some years later before Schmitt would become known outside of Continental Europe and in the United States.46

In recognizing the full extent of Yockey’s plagiarism, we are faced with the inevitable question whether the story of Yockey’s composing Imperium entirely without notes and references, recounted in Willis Carto’s famous introduction,

Writing in the late 1940s there would effectively have been no one in the United States or England who would have known Carl Schmitt’s ideas well enough to detect them in Imperium.

47

44 Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 74.

is in fact true. It would at first seem

45 George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt between 1921 and 1936 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970).

46 Despite an English language biography of Schmitt published by Joseph Ben-dersky in 1983, it was not until the 1990s that American interest in Schmitt became widespread and serious.

47 Carto wrote the following, “It was late 1947 when Yockey returned to Europe. He sought out a quiet inn at Brittas Bay, Ireland. Isolated, he struggled to begin. Finally, he started to write, and in six months—working entirely without notes—


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that it could not possibly be true, given the extent and, indeed, accu-racy, of the plagiarism. But Yockey’s memory was reputed to have been exceptionally powerful and essentially photographic, such that his college associates recall his reciting entire passages from Speng-ler’s Decline of the West from memory.48

With a memory so strong, it is possible that the story of Imperium’s composition is true, but one clear-ly must retain a skeptical attitude when dealing with a figure such as Yockey. While his devotion to the cause of European survival and European civilization is unassailable, Yockey’s plagiarism, coupled with the mysterious circumstances of his life, indicate that we proba-bly should not accept his account at face value.

YOCKEY’S PLAGIARISM OF SCHMITT Let us now turn to the plagiarism itself. Although the influence of

other books and essays by Schmitt can be detected,49 Yockey primarily plagiarized from Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political,50 and all the ex-amples of plagiarism provided below are drawn from this book.51 The plagiarism included below is drawn exclusively from the chapter “The 20th

It is important to note that Yockey’s plagiarism runs the gamut from quite literal and direct plagiarism to a somewhat less rigid dup-lication of Schmitt’s ideas. The latter consists of the unattributed yet

Century Political Outlook.” What follows is a sampling of some of Yockey’s extensive plagiarism of Schmitt’s work. I have ar-ranged the section in two parallel columns, with Yockey’s plagiarized passages in the left column and Schmitt’s original passages in the right column.

Francis Parker Yockey completed Imperium.” Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (New York: The Truth Seeker Press, 1962), xii. All citations are to this 1962 edition, the first American edition of Imperium.

48 “In the fall of 1936 the 19-year-old Yockey transferred from the University of Michigan to Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He entered the Jesuit institution a devout Spenglerian. Perry Patterson, Yockey’s closest student friend, still remembers his ability to quote page after page from The Decline of the West virtually verbatim” (Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 64).

49 One of these essays will be discussed below, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations.”

50 The Concept of the Political was first published by Schmitt in 1927, with second and third editions appearing in 1932 and 1933, respectively. As noted above, it was not translated into English until 1976; as there was no English translation at the time he wrote Imperium, Yockey must have translated the plagiarized passages himself.

51 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political.


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unmistakable copying of Schmitt and is as much plagiarism as is the literal plagiarism. Furthermore, while he generally plagiarized Schmitt sequentially, such that the plagiarism in Imperium roughly tracks Schmitt’s original writing, Yockey often re-wrote Schmitt’s work in such a way that the plagiarism becomes somewhat less than apparent. As a result, when comparing a sentence by Schmitt with a sentence from a plagiarized passage by Yockey, the plagiarism is not always obvious. But the plagiarism is easily detected when one in-stead compares the entire passage by Schmitt with the corresponding plagiarized passage in Yockey, because the ideas are identical or near-ly identical in the two passages.

Yockey also expands in certain instances on issues that were evi-dently of interest to him or which he felt required more fleshing out than Schmitt had given them. In some such instances, Yockey adds an original insight to what Schmitt had written, but in most cases, he simply provides examples (some of which are quite interesting) or secondary arguments intended to substantiate the wider point origi-nally drawn from Schmitt. For this reason as well, Schmitt’s and Yockey’s sentences do not always correspond precisely,52

but the overall passages do generally correspond, as should be clear in what follows.

FRANCIS PARKER YOCKEY Politics is a domain of its own—the domain of power. Thus it is not morality, it is not esthetics, it is not economics. Politics is a way of thinking, just as these others are. Each of these forms of thought isolates part of the totali-ty of the world and claims it for its own. Morality distinguishes between good and evil; esthetics between beautiful and ugly; eco-

CARL SCHMITT A definition of the political can be obtained only by discovering and defining the specifically political categories. In contrast to the vari-ous relatively independent endea-vors of human thought and ac-tion, particularly the moral, aes-thetic, and economic, the political has its own criteria which express themselves in a characteristic way. The political must therefore rest

52 One example of this is found in Yockey’s expanding on Schmitt’s view that

private relationships of antipathy and hatred play no role in the political distinction between friend and enemy. This is mentioned only briefly by Schmitt but in Yock-ey’s plagiarized version it continues for several sentences. In Yockey this is found at pp. 127–128 of Imperium, while the original (and much shorter) section in Schmitt is at pg. 27 of The Concept of the Political.


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nomics between utile and inutile; (in its later purely trading phase these are identical with profitable and unprofitable). The way poli-tics divides the world is into friend and enemy. These express for it the highest possible degree of connection, and the highest possible degree of separation. (Yockey, Imperium, 127) The enemy can be good, he can be beautiful, he may be economi-cally utile, business with him may be profitable—but if his power activity converges on mine, he is my enemy. He is that one with whom existential con-flicts are possible. But esthetics, economics, morality are not con-cerned with existence, but only with norms of activity and think-ing within an assured existence. While as a matter of psychological fact, the enemy is easily represented as ugly, injurious, and evil, nevertheless this is sub-sidiary to politics, and does not destroy the independence of po-litical thinking and activity. The political disjunction, concerned as it is with existence, is the deep-

on its own ultimate distinctions, to which all action with a specifically political meaning can be traced. Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthet-ics beautiful and ugly, in econom-ics profitable and unprofita-ble….The specific political distinc-tion to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that be-tween friend and enemy….The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of in-tensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-cal, 25–26) The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an econom-ic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stran-ger; and it is sufficient for his na-ture that he is, in a specially in-tense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible….Emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly, because every dis-tinction, most of all the political, as the strongest and most intense of the distinctions and categoriza-tions, draws upon other distinc-tions for support. This does not alter the autonomy of such dis-


40

est of all disjunctions and thus, has a tendency to seek every type of persuasion, compulsion, and justification in order to carry its activity forward….Another may be ugly, evil and injurious and yet not be an enemy; or he may be good, beautiful, and useful, and yet be an enemy. Friend and enemy are concrete realities. They are not figurative. They are un-mixed with moral, esthetic or economic elements. They do not describe a private relationship of antipathy. Antipathy is no ne-cessary part of the political dis-junction of friend and enemy. Hatred is a private phenomenon. If politicians inoculate their pop-ulations with hatred against the enemy, it is only to give them a personal interest in the public struggle which they would oth-erwise not have. Between super-personal organisms there is no hatred, although there may be existential struggles. The dis-junction love-hatred is not politi-cal and does not intersect at any point the political one of friend-enemy. Alliance does not mean love any more than war means hate. (Yockey, Imperium, 127–128) The world-outlook of Liberalism, here as always completely eman-cipated from reality, said that the concept enemy described either an economic competitor, or else an ideational opponent. But in

tinctions. Consequently, the re-verse is also true: the morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging need not necessarily be the enemy; the morally good, aes-thetically beautiful, and economi-cally profitable need not neces-sarily become the friend in the specifically political sense of the word. Thereby the inherently ob-jective nature and autonomy of the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis indepen-dently of other antitheses. The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as meta-phors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a private-individualistic sense as a psychological expression of private emotions and tendencies. They are neither normative nor pure spiritual antitheses. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 27) Liberalism in one of its typical di-lemmas…of intellect and econom-ics has attempted to transform the enemy from the viewpoint of eco-nomics into a competitor and from the intellectual point into a


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economics there are no enemies, but only competitors; in a world which was purely mora-lized…there could be no ene-mies, but only ideational oppo-nents. Liberalism, strengthened by the unique long peace, 1871–1914, pronounced politics to be atavistic, the grouping of friend-enemy to be retrograde. (Yockey, Imperium, 129) Enemy, then, does not mean competitor. Nor does it mean opponent in general. Least of all does it describe a person whom one hates from feelings of per-sonal antipathy. Latin possessed two words: hostis for the public enemy, inimicus for a private enemy. Our Western languages unfortunately do not make this important distinction. (Yockey, Imperium, 129–130) The lack of two words to distin-guish public and private enemy also has contributed to confusion in the interpretation of the well-known Biblical passage (Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:27) “Love your ene-

debating adversary. In the do-main of economics there are no enemies, only competitors, and in a thoroughly moral and ethical world perhaps only debating ad-versaries. It is irrelevant here whether one rejects, accepts, or perhaps finds it an atavistic rem-nant of barbaric times that nations continue to group themselves ac-cording to friend and enemy, or hopes that the antithesis will one day vanish from the world, or whether it is perhaps sound pe-dagogic reasoning to imagine that enemies no longer exist at all. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-cal, 28) The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates….The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship. The enemy is hostis, not inimicus in the broader sense. (Schmitt, The Con-cept of the Political, 28) As German and other languages do not distinguish between the private and political enemy, many misconceptions and falsifications are possible. The often quoted “Love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44;


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mies.” The Greek and Latin ver-sions use the words referring to a private enemy. And this is indeed to what the passage refers. It is obviously an adjuration to put aside hatred and malice, but there is no necessity whatever that one hate the public ene-my….The Biblical passage does not adjure one to love the public enemy, and during the wars against Saracen and Turk no Pope, saint, or philosopher so construed it. It certainly does not counsel treason out of love for the public enemy. (Yockey, Impe-rium, 130–131) Every non-political human grouping of whatever kind, legal, social, religious, economic or other becomes at last political if it creates an opposition deep enough to range men against one another as enemies. The State as a political unit excludes by its na-ture opposition of such types as these. If however a disjunction occurs in the population of a state which is so deep and strong that it divides them into friends and enemies, it shows that the state, at least temporarily does not exist in fact. It is no longer a political

Luke 6:27) reads “diligite inimicos vestros”…and not diligite hostes vestros. No mention is made of the political enemy. Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it oc-cur to a Christian to surrender ra-ther than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personal-ly, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, i.e., one’s adversary. The Bible quotation touches the politi-cal antithesis even less than it in-tends to dissolve, for example, the antithesis of good and evil or beautiful and ugly. It certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one’s own people. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 29) Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis trans-forms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group hu-man beings effectively according to friend and enemy. The political does not reside in the battle itself, which possesses its own technical, psychological, and military laws, but in the mode of behavior which is determined by this possibility, by clearly evaluating the concrete situation and thereby being able to distinguish correctly the real friend and the real enemy. A reli-gious community which wages


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unit, since all political decisions are no longer concentrated in it. All States whatever keep a mo-nopoly of political decision….If some group or idea becomes so strong that it can effect a friend-enemy grouping, it is a political unit; and if forces are generated which the State cannot manage peaceably, it has disappeared for the time at least. If the State has to resort to force, this in itself shows that there are two political units, in other words, two States instead of the one originally there. (Yockey, Imperium, 131) Unfortunately our Western lan-guages lack the precision which Greek had in this respect to dis-tinguish between intra-Hellenic struggles, agons, with the oppo-nent the “antagonist,” on the one hand, and wars against the non-Culture member, on the other hand, in which the opponent, e.g., the Persian, was the enemy. (Yockey, Imperium, 138)

wars against members of other religious communities or engages in other wars is already more than a religious community. It is a po-litical entity when it possesses, even if only negatively, the capaci-ty of promoting that decisive step, when it is in the position of for-bidding its members to participate in wars, i.e., of decisively denying the enemy quality of a certain ad-versary. The same holds true for an association of individuals based on economic inter-ests….Also a class in the Marxian sense ceases to be something purely economic and becomes a political factor when it reaches this decisive point, for example, when Marxists approach the class struggle seriously and treat the class adversary as a real enemy and fights [sic] him either in the form of a war of state against state or in a civil war within a state. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-cal, 37) Real war for Plato is a war be-tween Hellenes and Barbarians only (those who are “by nature enemies”), whereas conflicts among Hellenes are for him dis-cords. The thought expressed here is that a people cannot wage war against itself and a civil war is only a self-laceration and it does not signify that perhaps a new state or even a new people is be-ing created. (Schmitt, The Concept


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There cannot be said to exist an enmity unless the possibility of war is present. A possibility in fact, not a mere conceivability. Nor need the possibility be daily and imminent. Nor need the door be closed on negotiations before the possibility of war, and therefore true enmity can be said to exist. Not even among warlike States is life a daily blood-shed. War is the highest possible inten-sification of politics, but there must also be something less in-tense, the period of recuperating, negotiating, steering, preparing. Without the fact of peace, we would not have the word war, and—what the pacifists have never thought of—without war, we could not have peace, in the blissful, dreamy, saccharine, way they use the word. All the fierce energy that war devotes to super-personal struggles would go into domestic discord of one sort or another, and the casualty list would hardly be less. (Yockey, Imperium, 139–140) The relation of war to politics is clear. Clausewitz, in the usually misquoted passage, called war “the continuation of political in-tercourse by other means.” Usually misquoted, because it

of the Political, 29, Note 9) War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the con-cept of the enemy remains valid. It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but de-vastating war and every political deed a military action, by no means as though every nation would be uninterruptedly faced with the friend-enemy alternative vis-à-vis every other nation. And, after all, could not the politically reasonable course reside in avoid-ing war? The definition of the po-litical suggested here neither fa-vors war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism. Nor is it an attempt to idealize the victo-rious war or the successful revolu-tion as a “social ideal,” since nei-ther war nor revolution is some-thing social or something ideal. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-cal, 33) The military battle itself is not the “continuation of politics by other means” as the famous term of Clausewitz is generally incorrectly cited. War has its own strategic, tactical, and other rules and points


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does not mean that the military fighting is the continuation of politics, for this it is not. Fighting has its own strategic and tactical grammar. It has its own organic rules and imperatives. War does not have however a motivation of its own—this is supplied by poli-tics. As is the intensity of the po-litical struggle, i.e., of the enmity, so is the war. It was insight into this interrelationship that prompted and English diplomat to say that a politician was better trained for fighting than the sol-dier, for he fights continually and the soldier only occasionally. It is also observable that professional soldiers would turn a war into an agon before political soldiers would. The phrase political sol-dier is only ad hoc, to designate anyone fighting from conviction, rather than from profession. (Yockey, Imperium, 140) The disjunction of friend-enemy being the essence of political thinking and acting, is this to say that there is nothing between? No, for neutrality exists as a fact. It has its own rules and condi-tions of existence. The Western Culture developed as a part of its international law a law govern-ing neutrality. The very formula-tion of these rules for neutrals shows that the decisive thing is

of view, but they all presuppose that the political decision has al-ready been made as to who the enemy is. In war the adversaries most often confront each other openly; normally they are identi-fiable by a uniform, and the dis-tinction of friend and enemy is therefore no longer a political problem which the fighting sol-dier has to solve. A British dip-lomat correctly stated in this con-text that the politician is better schooled for the battle than the soldier, because the politician fights his whole life whereas the soldier does so in exceptional cir-cumstances only. War is neither the aim nor the purposes nor even the very content of politics. But as an ever present possibility it is the leading presupposition which de-termines in a characteristic way human action and thinking and thereby creates a specifically polit-ical behavior. (Schmitt, The Con-cept of the Political, 33–34) The criterion of the friend-and-enemy distinction in no way im-plies that one particular nation must forever be the friend of ene-my of another specific nation or that a state of neutrality is not possible or could not be politically reasonable. As with every politi-cal concept, the neutrality concept too is subject to the ultimate pre-supposition of a real possibility of a friend-and-enemy grouping.


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the conflict, the friend-enemy dis-junction….But the essential thing is that neutrality as a policy stands in the shade of the prac-tical possibility of war and active politics. For a country to become neutral as a form of existence would be to cease to exist as a po-litical unit. It might continue to exist economically, socially, cul-turally, but politically it could not exist if it were neutral. To re-nounce war is to renounce the right to an enemy. (Yockey, Impe-rium, 141–142). A pacified world would be one in which there was no politics. It would thus be one where no hu-man difference could possibly arise which could range men against one another as enemies. In a purely economic world men could be opposed, but only as competitors. If morality was also there the proponents of different theories could oppose one anoth-er, but only in discussion. Reli-gionists could oppose one anoth-er, but only with the propaganda of their respective faiths. It would have to be a world in which there would be no one who would kill, or better yet, such a languid, colorless and bor-ing world that no one could pos-sibly take anything seriously enough to kill or risk his life about it. (Yockey, Imperium, 143–144)

Should only neutrality prevail in the world, then not only war but also neutrality would come to an end. The politics of avoiding war terminates, as does all politics, whenever the possibility of fight-ing disappears. What always mat-ters is the possibility of the ex-treme case taking place, the real war, and the decision whether this situation has or has not arrived. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-cal, 34–35) A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics. It is con-ceivable that such a world might contain many very interesting an-titheses and contrasts, competi-tions and intrigues of every kind, but there would not be a meaning-ful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, autho-rized to shed blood, and kill other human beings….The phenomenon of the political can be understood only in the context of the ever present possibility of the friend-and-enemy grouping, regardless of the aspects which this possibili-ty implies for morality, aesthetics, and economics. (Schmitt, The Con-cept of the Political, 35)


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Since the symbiosis of war and politics forms its own thought-category, independent of other ways of thinking, it follows that a war could not be carried on from a purely non-political motive. If a religious difference, an econom-ic contrast, an ideological dis-junction, were to reach the degree of intensity of feeling at which it would range men against one another as enemies, it would the-reby become political, and such units as formed would be politi-cal units and would be guided by a political way of manoeuvring, thinking, and valuing, and not by a religious, economic or other way of thinking. (Yockey, Impe-rium, 144) We have seen what the “pluralis-tic State” is. There is, however, another type of pluralism, one of fact and not of theory. There is a pluriverse in fact, which is not merely an attempt to prove one philosophy or to deride another. The world of politics is a pluri-verse. (Yockey, Imperium, 166)

Likewise, religious convictions can easily determine the politics of an allegedly neutral state. What always matters is only the possi-bility of conflict. If, in fact, the economic, cultural, or religious counterforces are so strong that they are in a position to decide upon the extreme possibility from their viewpoint, then these forces have in actuality become the new substance of the political entity. It would be an indication that these counterforces had not reached the decisive point in the political if they turned out to be not suffi-ciently powerful to prevent a war contrary to their interests or prin-ciples. Should the counterforces be strong enough to hinder a war desired by the state that was con-trary to their interests or prin-ciples but not sufficiently capable themselves of deciding about war, then a unified political entity would no longer exist. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 39) As long as a state exists, there will thus always be in the world more than just one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist. The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe. In this sense, every theory of state is pluralistic. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-cal, 53)


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The Law of Sovereignty describes characteristics of all political units whatever. It places the de-cision in every matter having po-litical significance with the or-ganism. (Yockey, Imperium, 175) Every political unit in history has exercised in need, and sometimes not in need, its organic power to determine the inner enemy. If it does it soon and proceeds tho-roughly, the danger is past. If it procrastinates and takes half-measures, it ceases to be a politi-cal unit….This organic right to determine the inner enemy is not always exercised in the same manner. It may be open: arrest, sudden attack, shooting down at home, butchery in the streets. It may be concealed: drawing up of punitive laws general in their terms but applying in fact only to one group. It may be purely formless, but nonetheless real: the ruler may attack verbally the individual or group in ques-tion….It goes without saying that the exercise of such a right has no connection whatever with any written “constitution” which purports verbally to distribute the public power in a political unit. Such a “constitution” may forbid such a declaration of inner enemy, but units with such con-

This grouping is…the decisive human grouping, the political ent-ity. If such an entity exists at all, it is always the decisive entity, and it is sovereign in the sense that the decision about the critical situa-tion…must always necessarily re-side there. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 38) As long as the state is a political entity this requirement for inter-nal peace compels it in critical sit-uations to decide also upon the domestic enemy. Every state pro-vides, therefore, some kind of formula for the declaration of an internal enemy….Whether the form is sharper or milder, explicit or implicit, whether ostracism, expulsion, proscription, or outla-wry are provided for in special laws or in explicit or general de-scriptions, the aim is always the same, namely to declare an ene-my. That, depending on the atti-tude of those who had been de-clared enemies of state, is possibly the sign of civil war, i.e., the disso-lution of the state as an organized political entity, internally peace-ful, territorially enclosed, and im-penetrable to aliens. The civil war then decides the further fate of this entity. More so than for other states, this is particularly valid for a constitutional state, despite all the constitutional ties to which the state is bound. In a constitutional state, as Lorenz von Stein says, the


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stitutions have never hesitated in need, and have often invoked such procedure independently of need. (Yockey, Imperium, 177–178) A political unit has the jus belli, the organic right to make war on the enemy it has determined. Not moral right here—this organ-ic right is a thing independent of morality, even though also the strictest Scholastic philosophers gave to political units the purely moral right to wage war. But it is in a purely political way that the word is used here: the right to make war is a part of the habitus of the organism….In the exercise of its power to make war, a State disposes of the lives of its own subjects and of those of the ene-my. This bloodshed is not a life-requirement of a State, but occurs merely as a part of the process of acquiring power. The State di-rectly seeking power is not the one that brings about bloodshed and war....The right to make war and in the process to dispose of life is purely political. (Yockey, Imperium, 183–185) No Church could possibly ask its

constitution is “the expression of the societal order, the existence of society itself. As soon as it is at-tacked the battle must then be waged outside the constitution and the law, hence decided by the power of weapons.” (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 46–47) To the state as an essentially polit-ical entity belongs the jus belli, i.e., the real possibility of deciding in a concrete situation upon the enemy and the ability to fight him with the power emanating from the entity. As long as a politically united people is prepared to fight for its existence, independence, and freedom on the basis of a de-cision emanating from the politi-cal entity, this specifically political question has primacy over the technical means by which the bat-tle will be waged, the nature of the army’s organization, and what the prospects are for winning the war….The state as the decisive political entity possesses an enormous power: the possibility of waging war and thereby pub-licly disposing of the lives of men. The jus belli contains such a dispo-sition. It implies a double possi-bility: the right to demand from its own members the readiness to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-cal, 45–46) A religious community, a church,


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members to die for the Church—this is quite different from insist-ing that martyrdom is preferable to apostacy [sic]—unless it is be-coming a political unit. (Yockey, Imperium, 185) It would be cruel and insane to ask men to die in order that the remainder would have an unim-paired, or higher standard of economic life. When war is mo-tivated by an economic idea, the economics vanishes into the war-political situation. (Yockey, Impe-rium, 185) A morality-war is impossible not only from the moral side but from the war-political side. War is not a norm—one cannot fight against it….There is no rational aim, program, for economic, moral, esthetic or other change, no ever-so-correct norm that would justify one in killing. (Yockey, Imperium, 187) The essentiality of war to organic political existence is shown by the fact that a State cannot give up its jus belli without thereby

can exhort a member to die for his belief and become a martyr, but only for the salvation of his own soul, not for the religious commu-nity in its quality as an earthly power; otherwise it assumes a po-litical dimension. Its holy wars and crusades are actions which presuppose an enemy decision, just as do other wars. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 48) To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the pur-chasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-cal, 48) War…has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only, particularly in a real combat situa-tion with a real enemy. There ex-ists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no program no matter how exemplary, no so-cial ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other for this reason. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 48–49) For as long as a people exists in the political sphere, this people must, even if only in the most ex-treme case…determine by itself


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giving up political exis-tence….Inability to wage war is abdication in fact of political exis-tence, whether the abdicating State knows this or not. (Yockey, Imperium, 190, 193) The purpose for which the great political thinker Hobbes wrote his Leviathan was to show the world once more the “Mutual Re-lation between Protection and Obedience,” demanded alike by human nature and divine law. The Roman formula was protego ergo obligo. To him who supplies protection also goes obedience. (Yockey, Imperium, 194) We have seen that a world with one State is organic nonsense, since a State is a unity of opposi-tion. But some of the intellec-tuals wanted a world with no States whatever, singular or plural. They spoke of “humani-ty,” and wished to unite it for the purpose of abolishing politics by politics, war by war. They were thus affirming war and politics, but this remained hidden from

the distinction of friend and ene-my. Therein resides the essence of its political existence. When it no longer possesses the capacity or the will to make this distinction, it ceases to exist politically. If it permits this decision to be made by another, then it is no longer a political free people and is ab-sorbed into another political sys-tem. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 49) No form of order, no reasonable legitimacy or legality can exist without protection and obedience. The protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the state….Hobbes designated this…as the true pur-pose of his Leviathan, to instill in man once again “the mutual rela-tion between Protection and Ob-edience”; human nature as well as divine right demands its inviola-ble observation. (Schmitt, The Con-cept of the Political, 52) The concept of humanity is an es-pecially useful ideological instru-ment of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of eco-nomic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoev-er invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and mono-polize such a term probably has


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them. The name “humanity” be-came thus a polemical word—it described everyone except the enemy. This was of course noth-ing new, for this overworked word had appeared as apolitical word in the 18th century, when it was used by the intellectuals and equality-ideologues to describe everyone, except the nobility and clergy. It thus dehumanized the nobility and clergy and when power came into the hands of the intellectuals, in the French Terror of 1793, they showed that they considered their enemies subject to inhuman treatment because they did not belong to “humani-ty.” Again, politics and logic separate out: humanity in logic means inhumanity in politics. (Yockey, Imperium, 202–203) But yet the word humanity ex-cludes no one, semantically speaking. The enemy is also hu-man. Therefore humanity can have no enemy, and the “one State” liberals and the “humani-ty” intellectuals were involved in [was] the very sort of thing they wished to abolish—politics and war. “Humanity” was not a peace word, but a war slogan. (Yockey, Imperium, 203)

certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity. But besides this highly political utili-zation of the nonpolitical term humanity, there are no wars of humanity as such. Humanity is not a political concept, and no po-litical entity or society and no sta-tus corresponds to it. The eigh-teenth-century humanitarian con-cept of humanity was a polemical denial of the then existing aristo-cratic-feudal system and the privi-leges accompanying it. Humanity according to natural law and lib-eral-individualistic doctrines is a universal, i.e., all-embracing, so-cial ideal, a system of relations be-tween individuals. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 54–55) Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no ene-my…The concept of humanity ex-cludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being….When a state fights it political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a ware wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-cal, 54)


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The touchstone of any political theory whatever is its attitude to the fundamental ethical quality of human nature. From this standpoint there are only two kinds: those which posit “natu-rally good” human nature, and those which see human nature as it is on the other hand. Good has meant reasonable, perfectible, peaceful, educable, desiring to improve, and various other things. (Yockey, Imperium, 204) Every Rationalistic political or State theory regards man as “good” by nature….The assump-tion of the goodness of human nature developed two main branches of theory. Anarchism is the result of radical acceptance of this assumption. Liberalism uses the assumption merely to weaken the State and make it subservient to “society” (Yockey, Imperium, 204–205). The purest expression of the doc-trine of Liberalism was probably that of Benjamin Constant. In 1814 he set forth his views on the “progress” of “man.” He looked upon the 18th century Enligh-tenment with its intellectualistic-

One could test all theories of state and political ideas according to their anthropology and thereby classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously pre-suppose man to be by nature evil or by nature good….Goodness may appear in corresponding var-iations as reasonableness, perfec-tibility, the capacity of being ma-nipulated, of being taught, peace-ful, and so forth. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 58) A part of the theories and post-ulates which presuppose man to be good is liberal. Without being actually anarchist they are polem-ically directed against the inter-vention of the state. Ingenuous anarchism reveals that the belief in the natural goodness of man is closely tied to the radical denial of state and government. One fol-lows from the other, and both fo-ment each other. For the liberals, on the other hand, the goodness of man signifies nothing more than an argument with whose aid the state is made to serve society. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-cal, 60) [T]he first already systematic ex-pression, the treatise De l’esprit de conquête, had been published in 1814 by Benjamin Constant, the initiator of the whole liberal spirit of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century the idea of


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humanitarian cast as merely pre-liminary to the true liberation, that of the 19th century. Eco-nomics, industrialism, and tech-nics represented the means of “freedom.” Rationalism was the natural ally of this trend. Feudal-ism, Reaction, War, Violence, State, Politics, Authority—all were overcome by the new idea, supplanted by Reason, Econom-ics, Freedom, Progress and Par-liamentarism. War being violent and brutal, was unreasonable, and is replaced by Trade, which is intelligent and civilized. War is condemned from every stand-point: economically it is a loss even to the victor. The new war technics—artillery—made per-sonal heroism senseless, and thus the charm and glory of war de-parted with its economic useful-ness. In earlier times, war-peoples had subjugated trading-peoples, but no longer. Now trading-peoples step out as the masters of the earth. (Yockey, Im-perium, 211–212)

progress was primarily humanita-rian-moral and intellectual, it was a spiritual progress; in the nine-teenth it became economic-industrial-technological. This mu-tation is decisive. It was believed that the economy is the vehicle of this very complex development. Economy, trade and industry, technological perfection, freedom, and rationalization were consi-dered allies. Despite its offensive thrust against feudalism, reaction, and the police state, it was judged as essentially peaceful, in contrast to warlike force and repres-sion….The complete inventory of this system of antitheses and their possible combinations is con-tained in the 1814 treatise by Ben-jamin Constant. He maintains that we are in an age which must necessarily replace the age of wars, just as the age of wars had necessarily to precede it. Then follows the characterization of both ages: the one aims at win-ning the goods of life by peaceful exchange…the other by war and repression….Since war and con-quest are not procuring amenities and comforts, wars are thereby no longer useful, and the victorious war is also bad business for the victor. Moreover, the enormous development of modern war technology (Constant cites partic-ularly the artillery upon which the technological superiority of the Napoleonic armies rested primari-


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A moment’s reflection shows that Liberalism is entirely negative. It is not a formative force, but al-ways and only a disintegrating force. It wishes to depose the twin authorities of Church and State, substituting for them eco-nomic freedom and social eth-ics….Liberalism can only be de-fined negatively. It is a mere cri-tique, not a living idea. Its great word “freedom” is a negative—it means in fact, freedom from au-thority, i.e., disintegration of the organism. In its last stages it produces social atomism, in which not only the authority of the State is combated, but even the authority of society and the family. Divorce takes equal rank with marriage, children with parents. This constant thinking in negatives caused political ac-tivists like Marx, Lorenz v. Stein and Ferdinand Lasalle to despair of it as a political vehicle. Its atti-tudes were always contradictory,

ly) made senseless everything which had previously been consi-dered in war heroic, glorious, per-sonal courage, and delight in fighting. According to Constant’s conclusion, war has lost every usefulness as well as attrac-tion….In the past the warring na-tions had subjugated the trading peoples; today it is the other way round. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 74–76) The negation of the political, which is inherent in every consis-tent individualism, leads necessar-ily to a political practice of dis-trust toward all conceivable politi-cal forces and forms of state and government, but never produces on its own a positive theory of state, government, and politics. As a result, there exists a liberal policy of trade, church, and edu-cation, but absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics. The systematic theory of liberalism concerns almost solely the internal struggle against the power of the state. For the pur-pose of protecting individual freedom and private property, li-beralism provides a series of me-thods for hindering and control-ling the state’s and government’s power. It makes of the state a compromise and of its institutions a ventilating system and, moreo-ver, balances monarchy against democracy and vice versa. In crit-


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it sought always a compromise. It sought always to “balance” democracy against monarchy, managers against hand-workers, States against Society, legislative against judicial. (Yockey, Impe-rium, 212–213) [T]here is another political anth-ropology, one which recognizes that man is disharmonious, prob-lematical, dual, dangerous. This is the general wisdom of man-kind….There is a whole tradition of political thinking in the West-ern Culture, of which some of the leading representatives are Mon-taigne, Macchiavelli [sic], Hobbes, Leibnitz, Bossuet, Fichte, de Maistre, Donoso Cortes [sic] Hippolyte Taine, Hegel, Carlyle. (Yockey, Imperium, 218–220) Hegel posited a three-stage de-velopment of mankind from the natural community through the bourgeois community to the State. His State-theory is tho-

ical times—particularly 1848—this led to such a contradictory posi-tion that all good observers, such as Lorenz von Stein, Karl Marx, Friedrich Julius Stahl, Donoso Cortés, despaired of trying to find here a political principle or an in-tellectually consistent idea. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-cal, 70) What remains is the remarkable and, for many, certainly disquiet-ing diagnosis that all genuine po-litical theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an un-problematic but a dangerous and dynamic being. This can be easily documented in the works of every specific political thinker. Insofar as they reveal themselves as such they all agree on the idea of a problematic human nature, no matter how distinct they are in rank and prominent in history. It suffices here to cite Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bossuet, Fichte (as soon as he forgets his humanitarian idealism), de Maistre, Donoso Cortés, H[ippolyte] Taine, and Hegel, who, to be sure, at times also shows his double face. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Politi-cal, 61) Hegel…remains everywhere polit-ical in the decisive sense….Hegel…offers the first po-lemically political definition of the bourgeois. The bourgeois is an


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roughly organic, and his defini-tion of the bourgeois is quite ap-propriate for the 20th century. To him the bourgeois is the man who does not wish to leave the sphere of internal political securi-ty, who sets himself up, with his sanctified private property, as an individual against the whole, who finds a substitute for his po-litical nullity in the fruits of peace and possessions and perfect secu-rity in his enjoyment of them, who therefore wishes to dispense with courage and remain secure from the possibility of violent death. He described the true Liberal with these words. (Yock-ey, Imperium, 220) This was described as Macchia-vellism [sic], but obviously Mac-chiavelli [sic] was a political thinker and not a camouflageur. A book by a party-politician does not read like The Prince, but praises the entire human race, except certain perverse people, the author’s opponents. Actually Machiavelli’s book is defensive in tone, justifying politically the conduct of certain statesmen by giving examples drawn from for-eign invasions of Italy. During Macchiavelli’s [sic] century, Italy was invaded at different times by Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards and Turks. When the French Re-volutionary Armies occupied Prussia and coupled humanita-

individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere. He rests in the possession of his private property, and under the justification of his possessive individualism he acts as an indi-vidual against the totality. He is a man who finds his compensation for his political nullity in the fruits of freedom and enrichment and above all in the total security of its use. Consequently he wants to be spared bravery and exempted from the danger of a violent death. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 62) This misfortune occurred to Ma-chiavelli, who, had he been a Ma-chiavellian, would sooner have written an edifying book than his ill-reputed Prince. In actuality, Machiavelli was on the defensive as was also his country, Italy, which in the sixteenth century had been invaded by Germans, Fren-chmen, Spaniards, and Turks. At the beginning off the nineteenth century the situation of the ideo-logical defensive was repeated in Germany—during the revolutio-nary and Napoleonic invasions of the French. When it became im-portant for the German people to defend themselves against an ex-panding enemy armed with a humanitarian ideology, Machia-


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rian sentiments of the Rights of Man with brutality and large-scale looting, Hegel and Fichte restored Macchiavelli once again to respect as a thinker. He represented a means of defense against a foe armed with a hu-manitarian ideology. Macchia-velli showed the actual role played by verbal sentiments. (Yockey, Imperium, 221–222)

velli was rehabilitated by Fichte and Hegel. (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 66)

YOCKEY’S APPROPRIATION OF SCHMITT

In addition to plagiarism of various kinds, Yockey also lifted and in some cases adapted many ideas from Schmitt that, because of a prop-er lack of attribution, he misrepresented as his own. Nonetheless, he often made interesting use of Schmitt’s ideas and theories, frequently employing and applying them in ways never pursued by Schmitt himself. Here I would like to consider one particularly compelling example of Yockey’s use of an idea originally developed by Schmitt in the late 1920s. In the following passage, Yockey employs Schmitt’s European historical framework in order to understand the historical development of Western understandings of the Jewish question.

The ‘Jewish problem’ is not to be explained ethically, racially, na-tionally, religiously, socially—but only totally, culturally. From having seen at each phase only that aspect of the Jew which his own development permitted him to, Western man now sees the whole relationship, for his own Cultural unity is uppermost in Western man. In Gothic times, he saw the Jew as different only in religion, because the West was then in a religious phase. In the Enlightenment with its ideas of ‘humanity,’ the Jew was seen merely to be socially different. In the materialistic 19th century with its vertical racism, the Jew was regarded as merely racially different. In this century, with the West passing into a unit of Culture, nation, race, society, economics, State, the Jew appears clearly in his own total unity, a complete inner stranger to the soul of the West.53

53 Yockey, Imperium, 390.


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Here Yockey develops a position on the history of understanding Jews and their relation to Europeans that is based on a view of the in-tellectual-historical development of the West Schmitt describes in his essay, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations.”54

In this essay Schmitt argued that the West had passed through several “cen-tral domains.” A central domain is quite simply that area of life and thought that is deemed most significant at a given time, such that dif-ferences of opinion about the area in question are the source of debate and conflict. For example, Schmitt thought the sixteenth century to have centered on the domain of theology, such that theological ques-tions were deemed most significant, theological matters were those about which men quarreled, and theological questions were conse-quently those about which men went to war. Schmitt explains his theory in the following passage:

The Successive Stages of Changing Central Domains: Let us recall the stages in which the European mind has moved over the last four centuries and the various intellectual domains in which it has found the center of its immediate human existence. There are four great, simple, secular stages corresponding to the four centuries and proceeding from the theological to the metaphysi-cal domain, from there to the humanitarian-moral, and finally, to the economic domain….[O]ne cannot positively say more than that since the sixteenth century Europeans moved in several stages from one central domain to another and that everything which constitutes our cultural development is the result of such stages. In the past four centuries of European history, intellec-tual life has had four different centers and the thinking of the ac-tive elite which constituted the respective vanguards moved in the changing centuries around changing centers.55

54 “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” was originally a talk

Schmitt gave in Barcelona in 1929. It is now appended to Schwab’s standard English translation of The Concept of the Political (Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 2007, 80–96). The principal argument of “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliti-cizations” is in fact very briefly foreshadowed in The Concept of the Political (74–75).

55 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 81–82.


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Schmitt did not apply his theory to the history of Jews in the West. 56

56 This by no means indicates a lack of interest on Schmitt’s part in the Jewish

question. A book has recently been translated into English that addresses this issue in a systematic manner, albeit from a predictably philo-Semitic establishment stand-point: Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The “Jewish Question,” the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). Schmitt’s “authentic” views on this issue are nonetheless hard to ascertain because of the dif-ficulty in understanding his work in relation to the variety of political situations un-der which he wrote. Before joining the Nazi Party in 1933, Schmitt had very little to say about the Jews. After 1933, however, he wrote about Jews on many occasions, the most interesting example of which is arguably a book he wrote during the late 1930s, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Polit-ical Symbol (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1996), in which Schmitt developed a Jewish genealogy of the history of liberalism. Schmitt also organized a “Conference on Judaism in Jurisprudence” in 1936, and recommended that all books by Jews should be held in a “Judaica” section. He further proposed the creation of a “de-tailed public register of Jewish scholars” intended to “permit a ‘cleansing’ of Ger-man Jurisprudence,” according to which footnotes would read, for example, “Kel-sen, Hans, Jew” (Hans Kelsen was an Austrian Jewish legal positivist whose ideas Schmitt despised; see: Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], 39). The pertinent question, then, is why Schmitt suddenly began to write openly and critically about the Jews in 1933. More specifi-cally, the question is whether by doing so Schmitt was merely attempting opportu-nistically to ingratiate himself with the Nazi regime or whether he genuinely and independently adopted and held such positions and felt that he would not suffer under the new regime for publicizing them. It is probably impossible to know the answer to this question. Regardless, it should be clear from the above that Schmitt had much to say about the Jewish question in the 1930s that should be of great inter-est to readers of The Occidental Quarterly and to racial nationalists today.

This was Yockey’s compelling and innovative application. But it is clear that the overall intellectual-historical framework of changing domains Yockey draws upon is Schmitt’s. Schmitt argued that the central domain of a given age colors the way all issues are perceived and interpreted; in a theological age, phenomena will be interpreted theologically and understood in terms of their relation to theological concepts and modes of thinking, similarly with subsequent ages whose central domains are different. While it is unfortunate that he chose not to reveal the source of this idea in Schmitt, Yockey’s applica-tion of the concept of changing central domains to the Jewish question is legitimate inasmuch as it does not distort Schmitt’s original typolo-gy, instead remaining faithful to it. Because in a theological age all phenomena are interpreted in theological terms or in relation to theol-ogy, it is quite reasonable for Yockey to claim that Jews would be in-


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terpreted strictly as a religious group by those living in the theological period of European history, and similarly with the subsequent ages and domains of European thought and history.

CONCLUSION: JUDGING YOCKEY IN LIGHT OF SCHMITT’S INFLUENCE

It should now be clear that Yockey’s reliance on Schmitt was consi-derable indeed. My purpose in setting out Yockey’s plagiarism is based on the conviction that it is best to have full information about such an important figure, and it has been undertaken on the assump-tion that disclosure of the truth is always better than its concealment. While we may be forced to adopt some of our enemies’ strategies in order to emerge victorious in the face of increasingly totalitarian cir-cumstances globally, we would do well not to adopt our oppressors’ modus operandi of the lie.

Despite its plagiarism, Imperium is a profound and noble book and retains its place in the small pantheon of significant works advancing the movement for European survival and freedom. While some may come away from this article with an altered or perhaps lowered opi-nion of Francis Yockey, it is vital to recognize the great importance of ideas to our struggle.57

57 This is not to suggest that the “idealist” view of history — that ideas alone

have causal power — is correct. Rather, it is the relation between ideas and the rela-tive power of the groups that advocate them which is crucial for an understanding of the precipitous decline of the European peoples. At all events, it cannot be denied that it was a deadly cocktail of perverse, subversive, and false ideas — the principal means employed to bring about what Yockey aptly termed “culture distortion” — that has led Europeans to such an awful state of affairs as that to which they current-ly submit. These insidious ideas did not have a causal power of their own, apart from those who persistently advanced them, nor will our ideas alone be sufficient to transform the current anti-European power structure. And yet it must be acknowl-edged that ideas do have consequences, and that without a proper understanding of our plight we will make no progress.

Some of the ideas attributed until now to Yockey were in fact Carl Schmitt’s. But this does not mean that these ideas are less valuable in light of the exposure of Yockey’s plagiarism. Rather, if you are disappointed that Yockey copied many of his politi-cal ideas from Schmitt, yet you continue to find these ideas of great interest and value, I would encourage you to find and study their source in Schmitt. After all, had Yockey neither mentioned nor cited Spengler, Imperium’s extensive employment and adaptation of Speng-ler’s ideas would be no less compelling. Finally, while it is no defense of his plagiarism, Yockey did have the good sense to perceive the im-


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portance of Schmitt’s ideas and to use them effectively to advance his own project. For this he can be commended.

Sebastian Linderhof is the pen name of an American political scientist.

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