The World in Flames

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.