Where did Christian nationalism come from? What’s so special about Carthage? Both of these concepts have echoes in the European Right. In other words, European and American Fascism are Connected.
The Christian Nationalist Party
Francis Parker Yockey and two associates launched the European Liberation Front (ELF) sometime in late 1948 or early spring 1949. His associates were John Anthony Gannon and Guy Chesham. ELF’s manifesto was The Proclamation of London. ‘Even at its height, the ELF only had about 150 supporters. Its main task seems to have been the production of anti-American neutralist propaganda.’1 (p. 175)
In either late 1949 or early 1950 Yockey returned to America hoping to find poitical and financial supprt for the ELF from the Christian Nationalist Crusade (CNC), the largest American far-right group in the immediate postwar period. The group’s founder, the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, was a flamboyant demogogue and fanatical anti-Semite who began his career as an advisor to Louisiana Govrnor Huey Long, After Long’s assassintation, Smith helped co-found the Union Party with Father Coughlin and Doctor Francis Townsend. Smith lived in Detroit during World War II and enjoyed the patronage of Henry Ford. In 1947 he created the Christian Nationalist Crusade/Christian Nationalist Party as the postwar continuation of his America First Party.
Kevin Coogan p. 220
The St. Louis Police Department gave the FBI a memorandum about this meeting. Yockey gave a speech under his pen name of Ulick Varange. The subject was the underground working of the party in France, Germany, England, and Belgium.
All remarks at meeting were directed against the Communitst, Jews, Negroes, and Republican and Democratic Parties…VARANGE stated that he attended the trials at Nuremberg and other places and spoke of the unfairness of the trials and the importance of the testimony of the Jews. He also stated that we will have a Nuremberg trial in this country some day…
St Louis Police Department memorandum, as reported by Coogan, p. 221
Beyond Right and Left
In the last article, Marco Tarchi said Tolkien, the fantastic, the saga, had made a ‘group-mind’ possible. This quote is from his programmatic Beyond Right and Left. (By beyond, he means the conventional definitions of these two positions.)
There is a recent American book arguing the same thing. It’s author, Verlan Lewis is currently making the rounds in the United States. Several YouTube channels have interviewed him. In this one, the hosts seem a little uncomfortable with Verlan’s arguments. They may not have been aware of its echo in the European Ultra Right.
Richard Mellon Scaife and The League to Save Carthage
In the foyer of Richard Mellon Scaife’s Pittsburg mansion stood a brass elephant on a mahogany stand. Visitors might have thought it was the mascot of the Republican Party. This would have made sense because Mellon’s forbearers had been a financial mainstay of the Republican Party for a century. They were founders of Mellon banking, Alcoa Aluminum and the Gulf Oil Empire. But this elephant was actually paying homage to Hannibal, the fabled military strategist. Hannibal had scaled the Alps on elephant back to launch a surprise attack on the Roman Empire. This homage to Hannibal served as inspiration for a private organization that Scaife founded in 1964.
In his 2009 unpublished memoire, Scaife claimed to describe a ‘richly conservative life’. He likened his secret organization of wealthy men to the Romans who failed to prevent the fall of Carthage. He called them the League to Save Carthage. They waged a strategic war of ideas aimed at sacking American politics. According to Jane Mayer, Scaife’s memoire serves as a secret tell-all about the building of the modern conservative movement.2
In his memoire, Scaife estimated that in a period of fifty years he had spent a billion dollars on philanthropy. Over $600 million of that had gone into influencing American public affairs.
Bachofen Claimed Rome’s Destruction of Dido’s Carthage was a Spiritual Struggle
Chapter 32 of Coogan’s book covers Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World. In this chapter, Evola describes a strong emphasis on the masculine, as opposed to the feminine. Coogan cites Evola’s use of Johann Jakob Bachofen’s justification for this view in The Myth of Tanaquil (Die Sage von Tanaquil).
Rome’s central idea…the idea underlying its historical state and its law, is wholly independent of matter, it is an eminently ethical achievement, the most spiritual of antiquity’s bequests to the ensuing age. And here again it is clear that our Western life truly begins with Rome. Rome is the idea through which European mankind prepared to set its own imprint on the entire globe, namely the idea that no material law but only the free activity of the spirit determines the destinies of peoples.
Campbell, introduction to Myth, Religion and Mother Right p. 1, (as quoted by Coogan p. 307)
Bachofen has had a covert influence on both the Left and the Right. He was a great influence on Julius Evola. Thanks to Bachofen, Carthage has become a central idea for the Ultra Right.
‘Marx and Engels praised Bachofen’s concept of primitive communism in early societies. Evola, however, emphasized the Bachofen who believed that the transition of human society from matriarchy to patriarchy was the crucial moment in the evolution of human freedom.’3
‘Bachofen believed that Rome’s destruction of Dido’s Carthage was a spiritual struggle. It was a clash primarily of Grundanschauungen, spiritual ideals, and not of merely economic and political interests’ (Coogan p. 308). Integral to this argument was Bachofen’s claim about Christianity and other Oriental cults of late Imperial Rome. He claimed they were not merely foreign incursions:
‘On the contrary, [they] marked the re-emergence of an attitude to nature, history, and the state that had always been there but that Rome had tried to suppress’– namely its underlying matriarchy.
Grossman, Basle and Bachofen, p. 175 (As quoted by Coogan, p. 308)
Along the same lines, Evola argued that Heracles was the West’s first great mythic hero. Heracles dominated the Tree/Female life force principle by obtaining ‘Hebe, everlasting youth. By contrast, Dionysus stood for a ‘Chthonic-Poseidon from of manhood (Coogan, p. 306).
Ultra Right Influence All Over the World
In 1951, Francis Parker Yockey attended the MIF’s Naples meeting. (MIF, was the MSI’s women’s division, the Movimento Italiano Femminile. MSI was the largest and best-organized fascist movement in postwar Europe.) Yockey joined the MSI hardliners. This faction was opposed to turning the group into a purely parliamentary organization. This was part of the war between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings of Italian fascism.
During this time, an anti-Semitic group published a weekly called Asso di Bastoni (The Ace of Spades) (Coogan p.211). According to Coogan, Asso Di Bastoni was an excellent example of Italian ‘universal fascism’. On June 1, 1951 it boasted of Ultra Right Influence all over the world:
‘There is no place in the world where a fascist movement has not developed..From the ices of the island of Olafur Thors, head of the ‘National Front’, to the Tierra del Fuego, where Peron commanded, to the islands of the Persian Gulf where a section of the MSI exists…to the rice plantations of nationalist Thailand of the ex-collaborationist Luang Pibul Songgram, from the land of the Pharaohs and of the Pyramids where the dictator Nasser is developing his doctrine of the nationalist and authoritarian corporatism to the state of Azerbaijan where the memory of the deeds of Fatalibayli Dudanginsky are still remembered, to the Balkans with the Ustaches and the Iron Guards, and to the Mountains of the Phalange, from the English castles of Sir Oswald Mosley to the Russian steppes of Vlassov and to the Black Forest of the steel Helmets’ and of the Werewolves, from Budapest on the Danube with the ‘Croci Frecciate’ to the islands of Indonesia of the ex-collaborationist Sockharno, from the slopes of Fujiama, the sacred mountain of the Japanese, where the nationalist sect of the Black Dragon of Ichiro Midori is working, to the Indies where the faithful followers of Chandra Bose meet, from the Ireland of the Blue Shirts to Tunis of ex-collaborationists Habib Burghiba, from the Parisian Montmartre with the young cohorts of Doriot and the journalists of Rivarol to the fertile plains of Wang-Ching-Wei’s China, from the deserts of the Middle East of Daoud Monchi Zadegh and of the grand Mufti to the quiet and limpid waters of the Swiss lakes of Amaudruz, from the Norwegian fjords of Hamsun and Per Enghdal and Sven Hedin’s Stockholm to the Lisbon of the ‘Portuguese Legion’ the Slovakia of Tiso and Cernak and the Bolivia of Paz Estenssoro, from Mannerheim’s Finland to the islands of the West Indies where nationalist and phalangist movements are active in black shirts to Israel and the extreme rightist party ‘Herut’, everywhere, in every place and country of the world, the fascist approach has found and finds fanatic supporters.
Coogan p. 217