Yockey and Anti-Americanism

Francis Parker Yockey

Reading through the Francis Parker Yockey essay, I am reminded of why I left behind that stage of my ideological career. I was initially enthralled with Yockey due to his sweeping knowledge of history and philosophy. As I learned more about these subjects in my own right, largely inspired by his influence, I began to see the flaws in his analysis.

Where to begin?

1.) Racial Consciousness – White racial consciousness organically grew out of black slavery and the American frontier experience. Creating a White ethnostate is a peculiarly American project. The whole tradition of using race as a marker of ethnic identity started in America and the other colonies.

Europeans never defined themselves in racial terms. The British and Spanish did to a lesser extent after accumulating their colonial empires, but most European nations were never “racially conscious” in the American sense.

Germany’s brief flirtation with racialism was due to Anglo-American influence. Eugenics and Darwinism were also imported into Germany from Britain and America.

The German school of anthropology, which Franz Boas brought to America, had traditionally stressed the importance of culture over heredity. By an accident of history, the German culturalist school of anthropology triumphed in “race materialist” America while Anglo-American hereditarianism was exported to Nazi Germany.

2.) Economics – The Yockey essay posits the existence of “continental Europeans attached to Listian economics.” List’s own “National System” of economics was inspired by his observations of America’s economic development and Alexander Hamilton’s theories.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was the U.S. that hid behind its high tariff wall and the American state that constantly intervened in the private economy to promote “internal improvements,” the greatest of which was the Panama Canal.

“Yurop” was the world epicenter of the “free trade” movement. America only switched to “free trade” after the Second World War when the rest of the industrialized world was laying in smoldering ruin.

3.) Tradition – This idea that Europeans were attached to authority, tradition, and landed property is widely off the mark. Europe was the site of the French Revolution and Bolshevik Revolution. There was nothing traditional about the NSDAP in Germany or the Fascists in Italy; it was the decline of traditional authority that led to the triumph of Fascism, National Socialism, and Communism.

4.) Liberalism – America was founded as a republic. The American Founders considered themselves republicans, not liberals. Liberalism has traditionally been associated with the Netherlands and British Empire. America became infatuated with “liberalism” in the 1920s and 1930s.

5.) Enlightenment – It is commonplace in racialist circles to deplore the Enlightenment. If only the Enlightenment had never happened, everything would be swell, racially speaking. This is another old chestnut.

Most of the Enlightenment philosophers were racialists. It was the Enlightenment that inspired the first systematic attempts to classify the human races. The Enlightenment lionized science which undermined the old Christian ideal of the unity of humanity.

The roots of anti-racism can be traced back to Romanticism. In reaction to the Enlightenment, the Romantics glorified the “noble savage” and the primitive. They deplored modern industrial civilization. The modern love affair with the negro and all the screeds about how European imperialism has “oppressed” the Third World can be laid at the door of Romanticism, not the Enlightenment.

6.) Destroying Europe – Europe immolated itself in two fratricidal World Wars. It is hardly the fault of Americans that Communism was so popular in Europe or that European nation-states could not get along. A thoughtful American might respond that if Europe had developed a greater sense of racial consciousness, it would never have blown itself to pieces and lost its world leadership.

7.) Jews – Europeans emancipated the Jews all by themselves. By the early twentieth century, the Jewish Problem was already far advanced in Germany. Jews were involved in subversive movements all across Europe.

8.) Corruption – European nationalists have claimed for centuries that poor, innocent Europe is being corrupted by hopelessly decadent America.

In fact, upon close examination, you will see that the opposite is true: communism, romanticism, socialism, feminism, anarchism, fascism, liberalism, anti-racism, anti-fascism, postmodernism, cultural relativism, and post-structuralism were imported into America from Europe.

American youth are indoctrinated in these subversive ideals in public schools which is another European innovation. The last thing they are taught is their own history and traditions.

Francis Parker Yockey was brilliant in many ways, but his demonization of America and his romanticized portrait of Europe is false and misleading. That said, I highly recommend reading him. No self respecting White Nationalist should be without a copy of Imperium in his private library.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

50 Comments

  1. It sure is unusual how the American South, South Africa, Rhodesia, Australia, and the other “Colonies” who were allegedly so weak were simultaneously the last areas in the West to cling to a racially conscious point of view.

    It looks to me like the Soviet Union, formerly known as Russia, was promoting Communist revolution in the European colonies in Africa and Asia. It looks to me like France abandoned its colonials in Algeria; Belgium its colonials in the Congo; Britain its colonials in Kenya and Rhodesia.

  2. To elaborate,

    What makes Anglo-Protestant culture so supremely and overwhelmingly strong when it is directed by benign forces?

    Group altruism.

    What makes Anglo-Protestant culture so supremely and overwhelmingly self-destructive when it is directed by malign forces?

    Group altruism.

    http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/West-TOQ.htm

    “This suggests the fascinating possibility that the key for a group intending to turn Europeans against themselves is to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment by convincing them of the moral blameworthiness of their own people.”

  3. “I punctured several holes in [Yockey’s] romanticization of Europe and its alleged stability.

    Europe was no more immune to Jewish influence than America. Russia, as we have seen, fell to the Bolsheviks. In the 1920s, Germany was already overrun by Jews. France and Britain had Jewish Prime Ministers. The Netherlands was full of powerful and influential Jews.”

    Yes, mother Europe has many problems. Yet in the end, it is the United States that is dictating Jewish supremacism and white suicide to Europe and not vice-versa.

    What is more important to you Hunter? Getting your mind around that fact and really understanding it, or pretending it is not a real issue and instead sticking up for virtuous America against evil Europe in some insincere populist posturing directed at whom, exactly? Who is your audience here?

  4. Greg,

    Is a 200 lb Aryan muscleman who is dominated and bossed around and driven to ruin by a shrewish Jewish princess a strong man or a weak man?

    There are different kinds of strength, and you are focusing on the most superficial one.

    Your claim that America has false ideological foundations is a big part of what I mean by a cultural weakness.

    I would say that Anglo-American civilization was fatally flawed but certainly not weak. But this is all semantics and not a real disagreement.

    HW,

    Ridicule “common sense” all you want, but I would take the “common sense” of the of the American South circa 1950 over all the European intellectuals of the twentieth century. Back then we had the sense to know that America was a “White Man’s Country” and should remain that way indefinitely. If we actually cared today about our own heritage and tradition enough to reactive them, we wouldn’t have many of these problems.

    It’s too bad the rest of the country didn’t share the South’s common sense on these matters.

    What’s more, the “High Culture” of Europe has been pumping out one crazy idea after another for as long as I can remember, especially since the end of the Second World War. Look no further than Jean-Paul Sartre who traveled the world with Simone de Beauvoir sucking up Communist dictators and promoting non-White revolution in the Third World.

    Europe also gave us the concept of Republican governance and the best scientific tradition known to mankind. I don’t think the frontiersman invented these things while navigating the Mississippi.

  5. America may have pushed a number of these ideas, especially in the wake of World War II, but let’s not just blame the USA for all of this. The Europeans are doing a good bit of this themselves.

    I’ll go further. If the USA disappeared or broke up tomorrow and lost all influence over Europe, the political class and cultural establishment in Europe would continue and perhaps even accelerate its program of racial dispossession. It would make very little difference.

    As far as who the audience for this blog is (or should be), I can’t speak for Hunter but I would say that it is White Americans. That is our constituency and that who we need to build into a political and cultural force for a white ethnostate. Postings should be crafted with this in mind.

  6. I’m disputing the argument on the facts:

    This idea that Whites are uniquely evil oppressors of poor innocent Third Worlders, that Western civilization is loathsome and pathological, that Whites can redeem themselves through self hatred and slavishly sucking up to Jews and Non-Whites … DID NOT originate in this country.

    It got started in France in the 1950s and 1960s. It evolved out of French Communism and European anti-fascism. I know of several books that have been written about the subject.

    How is America dictating White suicide to Europe? Is that why France quit NATO and developed its own nuclear arsenal?

  7. I disagree strongly with Gregory Hood and his assertion that ideology should take a back seat to utilitarian political gambits.

    One cannot support a Jew-free White ethnostate on this continent and still rally flag-waiving, “USA!”-shouting patriotards.

    America, unlike Europe, has no prior metaphysical reality above and beyond its conception as a modern nation state. It denotes nothing more than geography.

    There is a scene in Covingtons novel, The Brigade, where an American officer is having an exchange with one of the NVA Brigade commanders (I think it is the scene where the Coast Guard station is turned over to Zach Hatfield, but I could be mistaken), and when the NVA fellow speaks contemptuously of “the Americans,” the American officer exclaims in disgust, “but you are an American, too!” The NVA fellow responds with something along the lines of, “I used to be, but I prefer to be a White man.”

    Are we Americans first or are we Whites (Europeans) first? I think that’s a decision all of us have to make. I have made mine.

    Death to the fallacies of 1775!
    ¡Viva la Muerte!

  8. Evola identified the Ghibelline Middle Ages as the “last great flicker of Tradition” in the Western world, so those associating Radical Traditionalist thought with modern European decadence are off base.

  9. “What makes Anglo-Protestant culture so supremely and overwhelmingly strong when it is directed by benign forces?”

    If only it were directed by benign forces.

    What makes America weak is that it was so thoroughly taken over by malignant forces.

    I am all for looking at the bright side, but I feel like I am being given a tour of the Titanic, but steered around the iceberg-sized hole in the hull.

  10. Robert,

    You misinterpret my point. I’m not saying “rally the patriotards.” I’m saying do something rather than navel gazing.

    Today is a good example. What, in the end, is the point of this exchange? Did any of us actually do anything? No, we are typing away over stuff that, in the end, is pointless. In fact, this entire debate, by getting everyone annoyed at each other for no reason, actively serves to get in our way. It should have never started.

    I’m increasingly persuaded that ideological argument often serves as a distraction — maybe even an excuse — to avoid real political organization and the hard work and compromise that involves.

    We can type whatever revolutionary slogans or esoterica we want but I’d take even a misguided activist over a basement intellectual any day. Besides, sneering at the patriotards is easy, but is there an actual revolutionary vanguard that exists in the real world that’s being built, or is this just more internet insurgency? Time spent even at a local GOP precinct meeting to try to pass a law restricting renting to illegals has more of an impact that even a 3000 word post.

    (And yes, I’m aware I wrote a 3,000 plus word post yesterday).

    I’m going to follow my own advice now, emerge from my own basement, rip myself away from this stupid laptop, and force my nerdy ass to get some work done.

    I now see how addictive this kind of blog lurking can be. I’m rationing my time on here from now on.

    Back to La Causa.

    GNH

  11. The Anglo-American system of localized and independent action is much harder for malignant forces to direct than the centralized authoritarian societies. The harder you make it for anyone to ‘direct society’, the harder you make it for malignant forces to direct that society. That’s why they are trying to centralize our society as much as possible in Washington D.C., New York, and a handful of other corrupt coastal cities.

  12. America is no exception to being taken over by malignant forces.

    Russia was taken over by “malignant forces” in 1919. Britain had a Jewish Prime Minister in the 1870s. France had a Jewish Prime Minister at the head of a Popular Front government in the 1930s. Germany had been thoroughly subverted by Jews before Hitler rose to power.

    South Africa succumbed to “malignant forces” … in the 1990s.

  13. “The Anglo-American system of localized and independent action is much harder for malignant forces to direct than the centralized authoritarian societies. The harder you make it for anyone to ‘direct society’, the harder you make it for malignant forces to direct that society.”

    A purely abstract point that sounds god but ignores the fact that Americans have been more thoroughly corrupted and brainwashed in our free and open society than the Russians were under their totalitarian system.

    As long as the checks cleared, American capitalists had no objection to Jews buying up the news and entertainment media, ownership of which allows them a “soft” totalitarian control of this society that is far more pervasive and corrupting than anything behind the Iron Curtain.

  14. Hunter Wallace,

    “It got started in France in the 1950s and 1960s. It evolved out of French Communism and European anti-fascism…How is America dictating White suicide to Europe?”

    The ideas aren’t originally American but the mechanism through which most Europeans came into contact with those ideas has been American media. Almost no one has ever read Gramsci – but a lot of people from that milieu ended up in Hollywood.

    It’s nothing to do with 99.99% of Europeans or 99.99% of Americans.

    It is worthwhile Americans realising the international influence of Hollywood because they’ll better understand where at least one strand of Euro nationalist anti-American sentiment comes from.

    Greg Johnson,

    “What makes America weak is that it was so thoroughly taken over by malignant forces.”

    Yes true. All i’m saying is there’s a possiibility of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

  15. “America is no exception to being taken over by malignant forces.

    Russia was taken over by “malignant forces” in 1919. Britain had a Jewish Prime Minister in the 1870s. France had a Jewish Prime Minister at the head of a Popular Front government in the 1930s. Germany had been thoroughly subverted by Jews before Hitler rose to power. . . .”

    And yet America is the Great Satan and Russia a far healthier society. What explains that?

  16. Did you know that Yockey in ancient Hebrew means ‘ hockey’.

    You see back when the world was young Israel had ice-rinks and superb displays of athleticism on ice.

    The Canadians think they have this one in the bag, but oh no-no-no Yokey’s family introduced the sport into the Maple Nation.

    So what we learn from this is FPY is a Jew.

  17. Greg,

    How is this a peculiarly American problem? Jews also bought newspapers in Canada, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and other European countries. They accumulated massive wealth and media influence in Europe. They thoroughly penetrated European academia in Germany and Austria-Hungary.

    When Hitler came to power in Germany, the Jews were as powerful and influential there as they are in America today. In spite of the all Prussian authority and tradition glorified by Yockey, Germany succumbed to Jewish influence and control decades before Jews climbed the social ladder into the American elite in the 1950s and 1960s.

    The Jewish problem was more advanced in Europe than America: look at Russia and Germany in the 1920s. That’s where America was at in the 1960s and 1970s.

  18. And yet America is the Great Satan and Russia a far healthier society. What explains that?

    If I leave Kia and a Porsche on a street in Detroit, and the Porsche gets stolen first, does that prove that the Kia is a superior car to the Porsche?

  19. “As long as the checks cleared, American capitalists had no objection to Jews buying up the news and entertainment media, ownership of which allows them a “soft” totalitarian control of this society that is far more pervasive and corrupting than anything behind the Iron Curtain.”

    There’s another point buried in that one. The later Soviets had television for “soft” control too but it didn’t work because no one believed it. It wasn’t an accepted moral authority.

  20. Greg Johnson,

    “And yet America is the Great Satan and Russia a far healthier society. What explains that?”

    jews moved from Russia to America.

  21. The later Soviets had television for “soft” control too but it didn’t work because no one believed it. It wasn’t an accepted moral authority.

    That’s how the mythology of the “free press” works in America. If you think one channel is propaganda, you can change to another channel. NBC too liberal? Watch FOX! Someone – who should have known better – once told me that American news media is the best in the world, because they all compete with each other to break stories.

    The difference between USA and the USSR – no Russians actually took Pravda seriously, while FOX-tards and MSNBC-tards in the US are passionately devoted to their particular brand of propaganda.

    As stated above, most people believe America to be like what they see in a Hollywood movie.

    The entire conversation about Yockey and America vs. Europe is incomplete because the birth of modern mass media – radio, film, and TV – had more effect in the modern age than any ideologies (a point our academics well-educated in various ideologies might object to).

  22. Russia took a lot of damage from 1917 until the 80s and then even more in the looting that took place with westernization. It takes time to recover.

  23. VVD,

    “The entire conversation about Yockey and America vs. Europe is incomplete because the birth of modern mass media – radio, film, and TV – had more effect in the modern age than any ideologies (a point our academics well-educated in various ideologies might object to).”

    Spot on imo. It’s like now. The western mass media is in an all-out war against the Catholic Church to get the Pope to resign because he was in the Hitler Youth. The pre-televison Catholic Church never had to cope with anything like that.

    (Admittedly i suppose they might have been better at preventing hostile forces taking over the media in the first place.)

  24. This is your brain on Anti-Americanism:

    Russia, as the Soviet Union, spends millions of dollars training and financing anti-White social revolution in the European colonies. For sixty years, Russia leads in the world in the distribution of anti-racist propaganda. For sixty years, Russia promotes the subversion of all European societies. It was the Soviet Union that destroyed the Third Reich.

    Yet the Soviet Union is admired. America is the problem.

  25. “… a better use of our time than naval gazing all day over Martin Heidegger….”

    “Can you see anything on the horizon, Captain Heidegger? Here, use the spyglass!”

  26. “flag-waiving” ?!

    All right, I know when to accept defeat. There is an inside joke here which involves plausible “spelling errors”, and I wasn’t invited to be in on it.

    Flagwaiving lol.

  27. Hunter, the United States allied with the Soviet Union to defeat the world’s only Jew-free white ethnostate.

  28. I agree with Hunter that so much of Americas problems did not originate in America, and I do really like his naivest posturing and much of what he senses to be true, is, but he has not taken the time to examine it in any depth, and does not seem to care to.

    We do not speak or write French so it is preposterous to suggest that France has somehow perverted America.

    We speak English, and the ‘”British” invasion into America in the sixties was a very real phenomenon.

    It subverted and perverted American music and culture thoroughly, after it’s own nation was perverted.

    Who specifically are these notorious French culture subverters?

    Where is the French Mick Jagger who came to America and professed his love for American “black” culture? Where is the French “Huxley” who moved to Los Angeles in the sixties to promote drug use and counter culture all the while advocating anti-nationalism and new world order institutions.

    What French celebrity gained the status or notoriety of even these two men?

  29. Russia, as the Soviet Union, spends millions of dollars training and financing anti-White social revolution in the European colonies. For sixty years, Russia leads in the world in the distribution of anti-racist propaganda. For sixty years, Russia promotes the subversion of all European societies. It was the Soviet Union that destroyed the Third Reich.

    Yet the Soviet Union is admired. America is the problem.

    Yeah. Yockey’s more optimistic take on the USSR and world communism was a clear blunder.

  30. “Yet the Soviet Union is admired. America is the problem.”

    jewish mass media is the problem (or a big part of the problem) Americans get the blame because jewish mass media is based in America.

    To illustrate the point

    “the Soviet Union, spends millions of dollars training and financing anti-White social revolution in the European colonies. For sixty years, Russia leads in the world in the distribution of anti-racist propaganda. For sixty years, Russia promotes the subversion of all European societies.”

    And how many Hollywood films were about that?

  31. Gregory Hood wrote:

    “You misinterpret my point. I’m not saying “rally the patriotards.” I’m saying do something rather than navel gazing.”

    Do what, exactly?

    “Today is a good example. What, in the end, is the point of this exchange? Did any of us actually do anything? No, we are typing away over stuff that, in the end, is pointless. In fact, this entire debate, by getting everyone annoyed at each other for no reason, actively serves to get in our way. It should have never started.”

    I am not annoyed with you or anyone else to whom I’ve addressed posts this afternoon, nor am I being eristic; I sincerely and firmly believe that we must choose loyalty to our European heritage over loyalty to the country in which we reside and the absurd egalitarian principles on which the latter is built.

    “We can type whatever revolutionary slogans or esoterica we want but I’d take even a misguided activist over a basement intellectual any day. Besides, sneering at the patriotards is easy, but is there an actual revolutionary vanguard that exists in the real world that’s being built, or is this just more internet insurgency? Time spent even at a local GOP precinct meeting to try to pass a law restricting renting to illegals has more of an impact that even a 3000 word post.”

    You say that I’ve misinterpreted your argument — that you are not trying to rally the patriotards — then, in the same post, you say that our time would be better served rallying patriotards at our local GOP precint. You seem to suggest that everything written for OD is essentially a waste of time.

    I understand your frustration with a lack of real world activism, and I agree with much of what you write, but I think it is dangerous to suggest that higher truth should be of secondary concern to us, and that practical politics should be engaged at its expense.

  32. Soren Renner wrote

    “flag-waiving” ?!

    All right, I know when to accept defeat. There is an inside joke here which involves plausible “spelling errors”, and I wasn’t invited to be in on it.

    Flagwaiving lol.

    It should be hyphenated for clarity, but it’s not an inside joke.

    I am not sure where I first saw it used, but I have seen it employed on numerous blogs in the same context: referring to Americans who ostensibly wave the flag but have already waive[d] the territory it represents.

  33. 1. “The problem” didn’t originate with Europeans or Americans. It came from Jews.

    2. Jews didn’t take over America in the 1950s and 1960s. More like the 1860s. Look at the eastern immigration invasion of the late 18th centur. Look at 1913 (built upon the National Banking Act of 1863). Look at the World Wars – wars against Europeans. And on and on and on.

    3. I can’t quite force myself to be as pro-Soviet as Yockey, but I sure as hell agree with his anti-Americanism. Post-1945, nothing that European governments have done have been of their own choosing, if you know what I mean. Yes, America has been and is the demon put to work to destroy Europeans. Hell, Russia couldn’t have invaded Europe without American “Lend-Lease”.

    The sooner the USA is dissolved and broken up, the sooner Europe will be free. Some Americans might even survive and build new countries out of the corpse. But if Europe is destroyed first, it’s all over for kith and kin.

  34. “Jews didn’t take over America in the 1950s and 1960s. More like the 1860s.”

    Could the jews have got the 1965 immigration law passed in 1860?

    No.

  35. Gentlemen, and Ladies,

    While a lot of good points have been made from both sides, I look at it this way:

    Much like there is no one single cause that leads to a war being lost, so too that neither one of the continents in question is more responsible on the whole for the situation we find ourselves in right now. We can argue for days on end the merits and demerits of the various European and American cultures, but what is of utmost importance is regaining our national sovereignties and national sanities.

    Though if I had to pick a side in this debate, I am much more inclined towards Alfred Rosenberg’s point above. Though I would argue that the Jews didn’t have enough power to be of influence until the Wilson administration.

  36. Sam,

    The world’s only Jew-free ethnostate blundered into two unnecessary wars with the U.S. and Soviet Union. While I admire many aspects of the Third Reich, Hitler’s geopolitical theories and foreign policy are not among them.

  37. America was one of Europe’s more disastrous ideas.

    Our project is to reclaim America for the sake of the European heritage that makes us who we are

  38. No, I have no experience with humanities, as a majority of Americans.
    How many Americans are exposed to humanities or social sciences? Are Universities in America littered with French professors or something? If so, I have not heard of it.

  39. Lena,

    Your theory seems to be that since French philosophers have no influence on American academia because they write in their own language.

    Would you argue that National Socialism has had no impact on the American Far Right because Adolf Hitler spoke German?

  40. “How many Americans are exposed to humanities or social sciences?”

    Normal people only get exposed second-hand through government programs based on them.

  41. No, that is not my theory. I am referring to specific individuals who subverted American culture. I used Mick Jagger and his love of black American Culture and Aldous Huxley who promoted psychedelic drug use. Now, please tell me what French Philosopher has embedded themselves onto the popular American mind the way these two men have.

  42. Europe’s disastrous ideas have been America’s misfortune:

    natural rights theory, abolitionism, romanticism, cultural anthropology, liberalism, anarchism, communism, cultural relativism, nihilism, political correctness, postmodernism, anti-racism/anti-fascism, feminism, post-structuralism, humanism, etc.

    Compare the output of Europe’s philosophers to good old fashioned American common sense:

    conquer the Indians, enslave/expel the negro, blacks are inferior, expand, segregate the races, build cities, establish White dominance, industrialize.

    The average redneck in Mississippi has a more sensible worldview than Jean-Paul Sartre.

  43. And German National Socialism was for Germany. So I would argue that it was an uniquely German phenomena, in fact I have. National Socialism as far as I admire it has to do with economic sovereignty, which America and Britain denied them and everyone else in the white world. The consequence of our economic situation is directly responsible for so much terror in the world including the disaster happing now in the Gulf.

  44. Lena,

    1.) In spite of National Socialism being a German movement, it had a massive effect on the American Far Right.

    2.) Similarly, the works of French philosophers like Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Levi Strauss, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and Simone de Beauvoir had a massive impact on the American Far Left.

    Note: Fanon was a French-speaking negro from Martinique. Jacques Derrida was a French-speaking Jew from Algeria.

  45. Lena,

    We are trying to trace the origins of a very specific worldview: Western anti-imperialism, Western self-hatred, militant anti-fascism, militant anti-colonialism, glorification of the Third World/hatred of the West. Where did all this come from?

    A good place to start would be with the greatest French philosopher of the twentieth century, Jean Paul Sartre:

    http://www.sartre.org/Articles/Sartreat100.htm

    I can’t say that Riding’s article is always informative. Take this observation, for example, regarding Sartre’s image as a “Left Bank intellectual.” “Even for many French people, his embrace of Communist causes placed him on the wrong side of history.” This was at a time when a fourth of the French were voting for Communists, so its also true that many French people (and not only the French) think he was on the right side of history.

    Those causes, by the way, were for world peace, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and freedom for the colonial peoples. Whatever may have happened to Communism – these were (and are) the right causes. As for “causes,” we can learn something from Sartre when we reflect on his statement that “if I ask myself ‘Will the social ideal as such, ever become a reality?’ I cannot tell, I only know that whatever may be in my power to make it so, I shall do; beyond that, I can count upon nothing.” You can’t be on the wrong side of that.

    Riding observes that Sartre’s reputation is approaching that of the great French pantheon (which he may soon join) of Voltaire, Hugo and Zola. But Riding shows his true colors when he states that as “political visionaries,” Raymond Aron (the conservative pro-US cold war intellectual) and Albert Camus “stand taller because their view of freedom was untainted by association with Stalinism or Maoism.” Guilt by association! While Camus couldn’t bring himself to back the right of the Algerians to throw the French out, Sartre risked his life (he survived a bomb plot) speaking out against French repression in Algeria. So much for standing tall!

  46. Slavery is a totally disgusting and replant situation that I find aberrant. You will have a hard time finding Americans that admire slavery in any form.

    I have no idea why romanticism keeps coming up here? What are you referring to? There is a huge difference between German and English Romanticism, so what are you talking about? “Romanticism” ended with the death of Shelley, so what are you talking about?

    And Americas misfortune has not been ideas, but actual public policy created by real people.

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