The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey

Francis Parker Yockey (1917-1960) was an American political theorist and activist who drew on Oswald Spengler's philosophy of history and culture to argue for a pan-European imperial political order. Under the pen name of Ulick Varange, he published Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics in 1948 and The Enemy of Europe in 1953. Yockey traveled widely under many aliases, seeking to build a coalition of fascists, Arab nationalists, Communists, and Third World revolutionaries to fight American hegemony, which he saw as Europe's primary enemy. He committed suicide on June 16, 1960 in the San Francisco Jail, where he was being held on charges of passport fraud.

The World in Flames collects all of Yockey's surviving essays and correspondence, including recent and never-before-published archival discoveries.

The thirty-one chapters range from Yockey's earliest surviving writings, "The Philosophy of Constitutional Law," written when he was an undergraduate at Georgetown University, and "The Tragedy of Youth," written for Father Coughlin's Social Justice--to his enigmatic suicide note, including along the way his 1949 manifesto The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front; his 1951 speech on Communist subversion, "America's Two Ways of Waging War," ghost-written for Senator Joseph McCarthy; and his final, apocalyptic geopolitical writings, "A Warning to America," a long-lost estimate of Communist China, and "The World in Flames," his overview of the Cold War.

The World in Flames also collects works that Yockey co-authored with H. Keith Thompson and Frederick Weiss, as well as fragments of his lost writings from the files of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation, which shadowed his every move.

Two appendices reprint the surviving issues of Yockey's newsletter Frontfighter and H. Keith Thompson's memorial poem.

The World in Flames is an indispensable volume for understanding America's most important anti-liberal thinker.

Francis Parker Yockey (1917-1960) was born to an upper-middle class family in Chicago, of Irish and German descent. Yockey gave a touch of genius (his IQ was measured at 170) to everything in which he was involved. His destiny would probably have been as a concert pianist but that was aborted by a car accident as a youth. He attended Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, De Paul Law School, and Notre Dame Law School, receiving his degree in law cum laude in 1941. He had also become a notable presence in the Rightist and America First movements. Despite his known association with such notorious figures as William Pelley of the Silver Shirt Legion and Father Charles Coughlin, Yockey entered the Army but promptly sought an honorable discharge by feigning mental illness. He was next employed as assistant district attorney for Wayne County (Detroit). In 1946, eager to get to Europe to seek out what remained of the European resistance, he joined the Allied war crimes tribunal in Wiesbaden, where he promptly found himself out of favor with his superiors, and returned to the USA. A perpetual traveler, Yockey went to Britain in mid-1947 where he made initial contact with followers of the British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, who were planning a return of Mosley to politics. He then went Ireland, where at Brittas Bay he secluded himself for months to write his magnum opus, Imperium. Although Yockey modestly insisted that he was merely following Spengler, his conception of "cultural vitalism" added a new dimension to historiographical thought, seeking out the organic historical laws that have resulted in the rise and fall of a succession of civilizations, which he believed would lead to the fulfilment of the destiny of Western Civilization as an organic unity, liberated from the "inner traitor" and the "outer enemy." Imperium was published in two volumes, then in 1949 The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front was published as a synopsis (backdated to 1948 to give historical meaning as an intended answer to The Communist Manifesto on its 100th anniversary). The newsletter of the European Liberation Front was called Frontfighter. Favorable reactions to Imperium were forthcoming from notable individuals such as Captain Basil Liddell Hart, the military historian; Major General J. F. C. Fuller, the tank strategy expert and Mosley's pre-war military adviser; German veteran leader Major General Otto Remer; German air ace Hans Rudel; the German emigres centered around Der Weg in Argentina; former South African cabinet minister Oswald Pirow; and the pre-war Canadian Fascist leader Adrien Arcand. Conversely, diehard anti-Semites such as Arnold Leese of the pre-war Imperial Fascist League and The Britons Society, regarded as anathema Yockey's Spenglerian definition of "race" and his heretical view that the USSR had freed itself from Jewish control. Yockey traveled widely under many aliases, seeking to build a coalition of fascists, Arab nationalists, Communists, and Third World revolutionaries to fight American hegemony, which he saw as Europe's primary enemy. Yockey's luck ran out in June 1960. A luggage mix-up at Fort Worth Airport, Texas, had resulted in a search to identify the owner. Multiple passports were found, and Yockey was arrested. Yockey was arraigned before US Commissioner Joseph Karesh, a some-time rabbi, who set Yockey's bail at $50,000 at the request of the State Department. With the prospect of a mental examination looming, his foremost concern was that information on friends and colleagues would be extracted from him and that psychiatric "treatment" would reduce him to a vegetative state. Yockey took his life with a cyanide pill during the night of June 16-17, 1960.

Kerry Bolton (b. 1956) has certifications in theology, historical theology, social work, and psychology. He is widely published in scholarly and specialist journals, such as India Quarterly; Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies; International Journal of Social Economics, and others. He has also been a contributing writer for Foreign Policy Journal and New Dawn.

John Morgan (b. 1973) was raised in New York State and graduated with a degree in literature from the University of Michigan. He was one of the founders of Integral Tradition Publishing in 2006, and was also a founder of its successor, Arktos Media, in 2010, where he served as Editor-in-Chief until 2016. He was Book Editor at Counter-Currents Publishing from 2016-2019. He has written for Counter-Currents, New Dawn, and other publications.