The Fundamentals

Fundamentals of a New Movement


The overarching, basic fundamentals of a New Movement are listed here. The link leads to the relevant post below. Also see "The Fundamentals" post list to the lower right. This is our new path. If you agree with this direction, then join with us.


The Old Movement is dead. Let us instead build something that works, a New Movement, a fresh start.



Friday, April 6, 2012

Yockey and Biological Race

A flaw in Yockey's work - likely the biggest flaw - is his denial of the importance of biological race, his attacks on "racial materialism" and "Darwinism" and his focus on "horizontal" (i.e., "spiritual") race as opposed to "vertical" (i.e., heriditary, biological) race.

Yockey is somewhat inconsistent, in that he makes clear that Negroes and Chinamen can never be Westerners, and although he cites "culture" for the Chinaman, he does mention physical differences for the Negro.

While some speculate that Yockey's opinions on this topic were formed by his ancestry (Jewish blood?) or the influence of Spengler, another, probably more likely, explanation that  is compatible with the above mentioned inconsistencies, is that Yockey was focused on intra-European racial differences.

One must remember when Yockey was writing, and that, while today, most people use "race" to mean the major continental population groups, in the past, there was much talk about the "Nordic" and "Alpine" and "Mediterranean" "races" of Europe.  Indeed, it was sometimes customary to talk of the "English race" or other "races" constituting what most today would call ethnic groups (of course "race" boundaries can be somewhat subjective - race or subrace? - and one can use "ethny" to denote various levels of biological differentiation).

Further, the "Nordicism" or "Germanism" or "Aryanism" of the National Socialist regime was fresh in everyone's mind when Yockey wrote Imperium, and Yockey directly critiques "materialist" National Socialist race theory.  The following quote from Imperium is instructive as to Yockey's probable motivation:


The touching of this racial-frontier case of the Negro however, shows to Europe a very important fact — that race-difference between white men, which means Western men, is vanishingly small in view of their common mission of actualizing a High Culture. In Europe, where hitherto the race difference between, say, Frenchman and Italian has been magnified to great dimensions, there has been no sufficient reminder of the race-differences outside the Western Civilization. Adequate instruction along this line would apparently have to take the form of occupation of all Europe, instead of only part of it, by Negroes from America and Africa, by Mongols and Turkestani from the Russian Empire.


Thus, I suspect that Yockey was primarily focused on "race" in its narrower aspects, and took for granted that people would understand the physical differences between Europeans, Africans, and Asians.  On the other hand, Yockey was concerned that an emphasis on "racial materialism" would damage the Western unity he so desperately wished to foster.

Perhaps Yockey could be excused given he wrote Imperium before the discovery of DNA and didn't have access to today's knowledge, especially the Salterian idea of Ethnic Genetic Interests.  The Yockey "problem" can be 'solved" by acknowledging  the biological differences that exist within Europe, and that these need to be preserved, but that these differences are small in the global context, and need not impede the Western Unity that Yockey recognized is all-important.