Patterns of Prejudice

ISSN: 0031-322X (Print) 1461-7331 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rpop20

Lost Imperium: the European Liberation Front

(1949-54)

Kevin Coogan

To cite this article: Kevin Coogan (2002) Lost Imperium: the European Liberation Front
(1949-54), Patterns of Prejudice, 36:3, 9-23, DOI: 10.1080/003132202128811466

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/003132202128811466

Published online: 07 Dec 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 212

View related articles

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rpop20
 KEVIN COOGAN 9

KEVIN COOGAN

Lost Imperium: the European Liberation

Front (1949–54)

ABSTRACT In 1947, just two years after the fall of Nazi Germany, an American
expatriate living in Ireland named Francis Parker Yockey wrote Imperium, a
massive tome that advanced a new strategy for post-war European fascism. Yockey
insisted that fascists abandon their narrow nationalist viewpoint and, instead, fight
for a new European-wide fascist empire, which he dubbed the ‘Imperium’. In 1948
Yockey and his closest collaborators left Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement and
founded the European Liberation Front (ELF), a British-based groupuscule that
lasted until 1954. Rejecting the possibility of building a mass fascist movement in
post-war Europe, the ELF defined its primary task as ideological: namely, the
advancement of the ‘Imperium’ idea inside the ranks of Europe’s ‘fascist elite’. The
ELF soon ran into stiff opposition from Mosley over Yockey’s controversial
identification of the United States, and not the Soviet Union, as Europe’s ‘main
enemy’. The ELF also met with fierce resistance from Hitler worshippers inside the
British right like Arnold Leese, who rejected the ELF’s emphasis on ‘culture’ over
‘race’. Despite the ELF’s relatively brief existence as a groupuscule, its introduction
of a new kind of ‘Eurofascist’ thinking has recently led to its rediscovery by
contemporary European New Rightists now searching for a new political strategy
following both the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the United States as
the world’s sole ‘superpower’.

KEYWORDS Alain de Benoist, Arnold Leese, European Liberation Front, far right,
Francis Parker Yockey, groupuscule, Imperium, Jean-François Thiriart, John Marston
Gaster, Oswald Mosley, Union Movement, Willis Carto

T he most surprising fact one encounters when first examining far-right

groupuscules is just how little they have been studied. While scholars
seem content to ignore them, intelligence agencies rarely make this mistake.
State-financed intelligence organizations, if anything, often exaggerate the sig-
nificance of groupuscules, and groupuscules on both the far left and far right
have long experienced covert monitoring, infiltration and even, at times,
secret state support. Given the combination of academic neglect and the covert
nature of the security services, much of the literature on the groupuscule-
dominated post-war far right stems from investigative journalists, advocacy/
watchdog groups, feuding rightists or defectors. Unfortunately, journalists

PATTERNS OF PREJUDICE © Institute for Jewish Policy Research, vol. 36, no. 3, 2002
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi) 0031-322X/9–23/027767
10 Patterns of Prejudice 36:3

often misunderstand the nature of a groupuscule out of ignorance or the de-

sire to sensationalize a story; advocacy/watchdog groups have at times used
their self-anointed ‘expert status’ to feed the press information that paints an
exaggeratedly dangerous or falsely conspiratorial portrait of particular
groupuscules, either out of ignorance or a pre-existing alarmist worldview,
and a great many of the internal polemics and fissures of the extreme right are
so highly partisan that claims made by participants cry out for independent
verification. The rare academic willing to examine rightist groupuscules, how-
ever, flirts with career oblivion, while university libraries remain frightfully
lax in collecting material many consider morally offensive and/or intellectu-
ally trivial. Faced with such discouraging conditions, the scholar who still
chooses to abandon the gossamer webs of poststructuralist theory for empiri-
cal research is soon confronted with a Sam Spade-like demi-monde filled with
the sort of plotters and policemen, visionaries and psychotics that would have
made even Jacques Lacan’s head spin.
Given this reality, the neglect of far-right groupuscules in English-
language academic studies of fascism seems a bit less astounding, even when
one considers the fact that virtually the entire post-war extreme right in both
Europe and North America consists of groupuscular formations. Yet, with a
few rare exceptions, there are almost no English-language books by academ-
ics on the post-war right that deal with groupuscules in depth.1
At the core of academia’s neglect of post-war fascism there also exists, I
suspect, a paradigm so well accepted that it is rarely stated: namely, that
fascism had its glory days in the 1930s and 1940s and the neo-fascist and neo-
Nazi movements that emerged after the war were essentially nostalgic
celebrations of the earlier period by ideological die-hards whose extreme and
culturally repulsive views, especially in the wake of the Holocaust, forever
doomed them to political marginality. In other words, fascism, as a political
system capable of having a mass following, has had its day and will never
return again. Given that assumption, it seems self-evident that any academic
interest in post-war fascist groupuscules is somehow not quite proper, and
thus the study of post-war fascism (which would inevitably be a study of
groupuscule-like formations) is a field best left to journalists, watchdog/
advocacy groups and others of that ilk.

1 Take the German far right, for example. With the exception of Kurt Tauber’s monumental
study, Beyond Eagle and Swastika (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press 1967), there
exists no detailed examination of rightist groupuscules in English. Jeffrey Bale’s Ph.D. thesis,
‘The “Black” Terrorist International: Neo-Fascist Paramilitary Networks and the “Strategy
of Tension” in Italy, 1968–1974’, University of California at Berkeley, 1994, is virtually unique
as a Tauber-like study that focuses on the complex interrelationships between intelligence
agencies and the post-war groupuscular far right, both in Europe generally and in Italy in
particular. American academics like Frederick Simonelli and Mark Hamm have also recently
written books devoted to specific far-right groupuscules: see Simonelli’s study, American
Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Urbana: University of Illi-
nois Press 1999) and Hamm’s profile of the Aryan Revolutionary Army, In Bad Company
(Boston: Northeastern University Press 2002).
 KEVIN COOGAN 11

Faced with the resurgence of the radical right that started both in the
United States and some Western European countries in the early 1980s, as
well as the emergence of the ‘red-brown coalition’ inside the former Soviet
Union, some of academia’s Olympian disdain for the study of post-war fascist
groupuscules has begun to wear thin.2 Yet I suspect that, even as this process
continues, another dilemma will inevitably arise whereby the paradigms now
used to define fascist movements and governments based on the pre-war ex-
perience of the 1920s and 1930s prove incapable of explaining post-war far-right
groups inspired, for example, by the German (non-Nazi) conservative revo-
lutionaries, ‘left’ fascists like Otto Strasser or Ernst Niekisch, mystical
aristocrats like Julius Evola or post-war advocates of a European ‘Imperium’
like Jean-François Thiriart or Francis Parker Yockey, whose European Lib-
eration Front (ELF) is the subject of this study.
The post-war challenge to the paradigm of fascism strictly based on the
pre-war model (which has given rise to what Roger Griffin has aptly labelled
‘acute taxonomic difficulties’) can be seen when one enquires into just how
‘palingenetic’ certain variants of post-war fascism actually are. Palingenetic
fascism, as defined by Griffin, stresses the notion of the mystical rebirth of
the nation as a critical founding fascist myth. Yet while the concept of
‘palingenetic ultra-nationalism’ is absolutely necessary when analysing clas-
sical fascism, even it breaks down at the edges when one explores the notion
of ‘universal fascism’ advanced inside Italy in the 1930s, or the idea of a feder-
alist pan-European fascist Imperium based less on race than culture, which
was advanced by some elements inside the SS during the war. After the war,
both Oswald Mosley and Francis Parker Yockey sought to overcome what
they perceived to be the limitations of palingenetic hyper-nationalism and
instead advocated a pan-European perspective, which Mosley called ‘Europe
a Nation’ and Yockey labelled the ‘Imperium’. One could argue therefore
that, while palingenetic forms of fascism were in some way defining for the
period leading up to the Second World War, the struggle to escape the restric-
tions imposed by palingenetic fascism lay at the root of the most intellectually
significant currents of the post-war extreme right.3
The distinctions made between nationalist-centred fascist movements
before the Second World War and the transnational fascist vision advocated
by people like Mosley, Yockey, Thiriart and the Italian far-rightist Julius Evola
suggest that fascism, like any other ideology, mutates over time in response to

2 One example is the development of the ‘Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy’ led
by Roger Eatwell and Cas Mudde, although even here most of the participants are more
interested in conventional topics like right-populist political parties and public reactions to
immigration than to the study of the groupuscular hard right.
3 Arguably, the palingenetic notion of the rebirth of a fascist New Man that occurred in a
national context before the war (as in the Nazi concept of the Volk or Mussolini’s invocation
of a new Roman empire) mutated after the war as people like Mosley and Yockey called for
the rebirth of the New European Man, whose commitment to Europe transcended national
boundaries without totally abandoning the palingenetic vision.
12 Patterns of Prejudice 36:3

different economic, political, and cultural changes in the larger milieu within
which it is forced to operate. Whereas ‘left-wing’ fascist movements in Eu-
rope—groups such as Otto Strasser’s Black Front or Ernst Niekisch’s
national-Bolshevik Widerstand group—have been highly marginal, in the so-
called Third World ‘left-wing’ fascist thinking has played an extremely
significant role in nations like Egypt and Argentina.4 It can even be argued
that the rise of third-position neo-fascist groups in 1970s Italy was inspired in
part by the third-positionist government in Libya.
Seen in this light, certain contemporary fascist groupuscules emerge from
the shadows no longer as mere echoes of the past, but rather as evidence
from inside the far right itself of continuing ideological mutations occurring
within fascism that do not easily conform to older paradigms. While no one
would deny that the contemporary far right continues to be littered with
small sects that do in fact attempt to recreate, in a ritualistic or fetish-like
fashion, the imagined glories of the Third Reich, as many avowed neo-Nazis
clearly do—no matter how absurdly inappropriate such utopian projections
are to the contemporary world—there are other groupuscules that are seek-
ing to devise novel approaches to fascism in order to ‘break through’ to
contemporary society. While such groupuscules are almost by definition ‘mar-
ginal’, it may well be that in their marginality lies their strength as well as
their weakness, precisely because as marginal formations they allow greater
room for ideological mutation away from older (failed) forms of fascism. Once
one recognizes that these micro-formations are struggling to incubate new
‘strains’ of fascism appropriate to the contemporary world, there is no reason
to accept the claim that they have no relevance to serious students of fascist
ideology.

The ELF and the mutation of fascist ideology

One of the earliest attempts at redefining fascism for the post-war era came
with the inauguration of the European Liberation Front. The ELF is particu-
larly relevant for our purpose, I would argue, precisely because its cadre were
consciously devoted not to the utopian fantasy of building a mass fascist move-
ment in the wake of the defeat of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy but to the
construction of a new permutation of fascist ideology appropriate to the radi-
cally new conditions fascists found themselves in after the war. Instead of
mimicking the mass party model, the ELF consciously aimed its polemics at
what it saw as the most intellectually advanced elements inside the post-war
European far right to win them over to a new, more transnational fascist vision.
In the fall of 1949 Francis Parker Yockey, Guy Chesham and John
Anthony ‘Tony’ Gannon, three dissident members of Sir Oswald Mosley’s
Union Movement (UM), founded the European Liberation Front. The ELF
announced its presence with The Proclamation of London, a thirty-two-page

4 A. James Gregor, a leading expert on Italian fascism, argues as much in his important book
The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1974).
 KEVIN COOGAN 13

programmatic manifesto penned by Yockey.5 Then in early 1950 the group

began publishing Frontfighter, a four-page newsletter, on a rotary duplicator.
Frontfighter, whose circulation reached 500 copies a month, carried the ELF’s
message to far rightists around the world. The ELF tried to pave the way for
a new ‘post-Hitler’ form of ‘Eurofascism’ that transcended pre-war fascism’s
narrow hyper-nationalism as well as the racialist ‘biopolitics’ at the heart of
Nazi ideology. The ELF demanded that the post-war fascist movement make
as its highest priority the task of uniting Europe as a whole into a new Imperium
against its two ‘outer enemies’, the United States and the Soviet Union. The
group’s views were particularly inspired by Yockey’s 1948 book Imperium,
first published in London in two volumes and still in print today.
The ELF, however, quickly developed serious internal conflicts. First,
Yockey and Chesham had a bitter personal quarrel that only ended with
Chesham’s resignation. Yockey then abandoned England for the United States,
where he tried unsuccessfully to organize an American counterpart to the
ELF. As a result, Tony Gannon wound up directing the ELF’s day-to-day
operations for the next four years. While the group managed to hold a few
public gatherings, particularly in the North, around Gannon’s hometown of
Manchester, it never had more than a handful of serious followers. When
Gannon decided to move to South America in the autumn of 1954, the ELF
officially entered history’s dustbin.
The ELF’s fate is not surprising given the dismal history of the British
far right in the early post-war period. The political climate was so inhospita-
ble that even Oswald Mosley abandoned active political involvement in the
early 1950s. Yet, unlike Mosley’s UM, the ELF never viewed itself as a poten-
tial mass movement. Years later, Gannon recalled that the founding of the
ELF was more

an act of faith in the future and destiny of the European Imperium; this act was
made without illusions as to the likely outcome in the measurable future . . . [we]
knew the chance of success for a new mass party was remote, as the experience of
others—even without our radical position—confirmed on every side. Knowing
this did not discourage us; it was our task to erect signposts, to produce situation-
estimations showing what had happened to Europe, and WHY it had happened, and
what was required to liberate Europe.6

Although the ELF’s story remains virtually unknown inside academia,

the group has recently undergone a surprising rediscovery by the European
right. Today, a coalition of rightist groupuscules—including Christian
Bouchet’s Résistance (later Nouvelle Résistance and now Unité Radicale), Troy
Southgate’s National Revolutionary Faction, Spain’s Alternativa Europea and
Russia’s National-Bolshevik Party—adopt the name ‘European Liberation

5 The Proclamation of London is available on the Internet at www.faem.com/yockey/yok71.htm

(as of 20 May 2002).
6 John Anthony Gannon, ‘A Remembrance of the Author of Imperium’, 4: H. Keith Thompson
Collection, Hoover Institute, Stanford, CA.
14 Patterns of Prejudice 36:3

Front’ in honour of their English predecessor. This new ELF referenced its
roots in its founding manifesto when it declared: ‘the European Liberation
Front (ELF) is . . . part of an organic, living tradition. In the past, this tradi-
tion has been chiefly propagated by men such as Francis Parker Yockey, Otto
Strasser and Jean Thiriart.’7 The declaration then quoted at length from The
Proclamation of London.
The story of the first ELF, as well as the renewed interest in it today, is
intimately tied to its self-defined mission: the promotion of the idea of a united
fascist Europe as a new Imperium. The ELF wanted to spread its ‘imperial’
Weltanschauung not to the ‘masses’ but rather to Europe’s fascist ‘elite’. The
ELF’s founders, Gannon recalled, saw themselves as embarked on a quest to
transform European fascism:

We had the idea of founding an Order, secret of necessity, of the elite of our Idea
within the Imperium which would work to secure the adherence of highly-placed
people in all Western lands, knowing that all revolutions are made from above and
not below.8

The ELF’s significance, then, cannot easily be judged by quantitative measures

since the group’s raison d’être lay not in the creation of a mass movement but
rather in the realm of ideas. The ELF argued that the post-war fascist move-
ment had to abandon narrow nationalism and become ‘good Europeans’. The
coming struggle was to build a new pan-European fascist superpower, the
Imperium. Until then, Europe would remain under ‘occupation’ by the United
States and the Soviet Union. The ELF was equally fervid in its most contro-
versial assertion: namely that, of the two ‘outer enemies’, it was the United
States, not Russia, that posed the greatest threat to Europe’s future.
The ELF’s primary mission was ideological, and its target audience con-
sisted of already deeply committed fascists. The group’s demise was primarily
due to its inability to convert other far rightists to its ‘neutralist’ anti-Ameri-
can message. In the early 1950s the overwhelming majority of rightists rejected
the ELF’s siren song and pragmatically chose to embrace temporary Ameri-
can hegemony as the lesser of two evils. When the Soviet occupation of Eastern
Europe finally ended in 1989, however, the geopolitical rationale that made
anti-Americanism unpalatable to an older generation also ended. Then, in
1991, with the final collapse of the Soviet Union, a new geopolitical paradigm
was born. The ELF’s recent rediscovery by a new wave of post-Cold War
fascist activists arguably reflects a growing perception inside the far right that
the United States, the last superpower, remains Europe’s last great enemy.

7 For the manifesto, see Troy Southgate, ‘The manifesto of the European Liberation Front’,
1999, www.obsidian-blade.com/synthesis/articles/elf.htm (as of 29 May 2002). As well as the
ELF, this network includes a Liaison Committee for Revolutionary Nationalism, incorporat-
ing extra-European groupuscules like the American Front, the Canadian Front and the New
Zealand-based National Destiny.
8 Gannon.
 KEVIN COOGAN 15

Yockey and Mosley’s Union Movement

The ELF’s roots date back to the spring of 1948 when Francis Parker Yockey,
an American expatriate lawyer, moved to London to work with the Union
Movement (UM). Born in Chicago in 1917, Yockey embraced far-right poli-
tics in the early 1930s after reading Oswald Spengler’s opus The Decline of
the West. After studying at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, Yockey
returned to the Midwest where he worked closely with the German-Ameri-
can Bund while also acquiring a law degree from Notre Dame University. In
1942 Yockey entered the US Army. During his brief military career, he went
AWOL for a few months on a mysterious trip to Mexico, where he may have
made contact with German intelligence operatives. Upon his return to the
United States, he faked a nervous breakdown and won a medical discharge
from the army.
In early 1946 Yockey volunteered to go to Germany as a lawyer for the
War Crimes Tribunal. He spent about a year working for the US War Depart-
ment’s 7708 War Crimes Group in Wiesbaden as an appeals attorney. While
in Germany, Yockey also tried to subvert the war crimes process from within.9
He then spent the autumn and winter of 1947 in Brittas Bay, Ireland. There,
using the pseudonym ‘Ulick Varange’, he wrote Imperium. A massive 600-
page tome, Imperium demanded the formation of a united post-war fascist
Europe stretching from ‘Galway to the Urals’. Yockey argued that, once the
idea of the Imperium was established, ‘no force within the Civilization’ could
resist the coming ‘Cultural Reunion’ that would unite ‘North and South,
Teuton and Latin, Protestant and Catholic, Prussia, England, Spain, Italy, and
France’.10 Only then would Europe have the power finally to expel the Ameri-
can and Russian ‘outer enemies’.
In the spring of 1948, just as the Union Movement was being launched,
Yockey arrived in London and began writing articles for the UM paper Ac-
tion.11 Lady Diana Mosley recalled that around this time Yockey even spent ‘a
few days at an inn in Ramsbury’, a village just a few miles from Mosley’s
home in Crowood, Wiltshire. After a few days spent discussing politics with
Yockey, Mosley pronounced the young American ‘clever’.12 Guy Chesham, a
Mosley aide-de-camp who headed the UM’s European Contact Section, soon
became Yockey’s closest intellectual collaborator. A fervent Europeanist,
Chesham regularly visited the Continent on Mosley’s behalf.
Yockey’s presence inside the UM can be felt in articles that he wrote for
Action.13 In the 13 March 1948 issue, he used the events surrounding King

9 Yockey even sent internal War Crimes Tribunal documents to the French rightist Maurice
Bardèche, one of the earliest critics of the war crimes trials.
10 ‘Ulick Valange’ [pseud., i.e. Francis Parker Yockey], Imperium: The Philosophy of History
and Politics (Torrance, CA: Noontide Press 1983), 615.
11 Yockey’s name first appears on page 4 of the 21 February 1948 issue of Action in the classified
ads, where he requests a ‘bed-sitting room’ in West London.
12 Letter from Lady Diana Mosley to Keith Stimely, 29 June 1982: H. Keith Thompson Collec-
tion, Hoover Institute, Stanford, CA.
13 See, for example, articles by ‘F.P.Y.’ in the 6 and 13 March 1948 issues of Action.
16 Patterns of Prejudice 36:3

Michael of Romania’s forced exile by the Communists to attack the British

government bitterly for its failure to recognize the legitimacy of exiled leaders
of Eastern European nations like Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. His influ-
ence can also be seen in a series of articles that Guy Chesham wrote for Action,
particularly Chesham’s 17 July 1948 essay entitled ‘The European Revolution’.
Here Chesham (identified only as ‘G.C.’) argued that White Russians, as well
as the Balts and Ukrainians, should be considered part of Europe’s cultural
sphere.14 He also praised the ‘heroic’ Bandera group of Ukrainian nationalists.
Yockey’s interest in Eastern Europe may help explain his links to former
Major General J. F. C. Fuller. A one-time British Union of Fascists (BUF)
member, Fuller first met Yockey on 6 February 1948.15 At the time Fuller was
extremely active in building support for far-right Eastern European exile
movements in England. An opponent of the Nuremberg trials, he also wel-
comed Yockey’s insider knowledge regarding the war crimes tribunal. After
Imperium’s publication, Fuller praised it as ‘the most prophetic book since
The Decline of the West’.16

The Cold War question

In 1947, while Yockey was still writing Imperium in Ireland, Oswald Mosley
published The Alternative, his own book-length blueprint for the post-war
fascist movement. Abandoning his earlier support for the British Empire,
Mosley demanded a new pan-European geopolitical union based on the eco-
nomic exploitation of Africa’s vast natural resources. Mosley called his new
concept ‘Europe a Nation’. Like Yockey, Mosley drew heavily on Oswald
Spengler, seeing in Spengler’s concept of Europe as a unified ‘Faustian’ cul-
tural unit an ideological bulwark for a new federalist European super-state
based far more on culture than on race or nationality.17 Yockey’s arguments in
Imperium even struck some Mosley loyalists as a mere rehash of ideas first
advanced in The Alternative.
The harsh reality of a Europe divided into two armed camps, however,
soon forced both Yockey and Mosley to take a stand on Europe’s role in the
broader conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. By 1948,
with the Berlin crisis placing the Continent on the brink of a new war, it
became almost impossible not to have a position on the struggle between the
US and the USSR. Faced with the imminent prospect of a new war, Mosley
decided to play the anti-Communist card to the hilt. Believing that renewed

14 Mosley also contributed a small insert supporting Chesham’s article.

15 I would like to thank both Steve Dorril and Graham Macklin for pointing out Fuller’s men-
tion of Yockey in his diaries. Yockey also met Sir Basil Liddell Hart and a 11 December 1948
letter from Yockey to Liddell Hart is listed in Liddell Hart’s archives.
16 Fuller’s endorsement was cited in a 1951 book review of Imperium that appeared in the Ar-
gentine-based neo-Nazi journal Der Weg, vol. 5, no. 9, 1951. For more on Fuller, see Stephen
Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service (New York:
The Free Press 2000), 441–5.
17 On Spengler’s influence on the English right, see Richard Thurlow, ‘Destiny and doom:
Spengler, Hitler and “British” fascism’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 15, no. 4, 1981.
 KEVIN COOGAN 17

anti-Communist sentiment in the West could be used to rehabilitate fascists as

‘premature anti-communists’, Action regularly ran banner headlines about
Soviet preparations for World War III. In an attempt to overcome the stigma
of treason, Mosley in speech after speech pledged the UM’s members’ eager-
ness to place themselves ‘unreservedly at the service of their country, and at the
disposal of any Government in power’ in any war with Russia.18 He even
advocated the use of nuclear weapons during the Berlin crisis should the So-
viets refuse to back down to Allied demands.19 The UM also used the political
crisis to undermine the prosecution of war criminals like Italy’s Prince Junio
Valerio Borghese, who directed a bloody campaign with SS support against
Communist-led partisans in North Italy. How was it possible, the 22 January
1949 issue of Action wondered, for the Italian government to jail Borghese for
war crimes ‘at a time when Italy . . . is being wooed by the Western Powers as
a partner in the “Atlantic Pact” to defend Western Europe from the Red peril’?
In his 1950 pamphlet, The European Situation: The Third Force, Mosley
starkly posed the geopolitical choice then facing the far right:

Europe lies helpless between the powers of America and Russia; and is chiefly oc-
cupied or controlled by the former. Until Europe is free, some are indifferent which
is the occupying power. That attitude reveals an inability to grasp realities and an
error in tactics. Let us regard facts and nothing but facts. Under Russia, European
freedom is killed, and under America, European freedom can still exist and even
grow. That is the basic difference which must determine the question of attitude.
On the one side is a police apparatus which crushes all opposition and prevents the
expression of all contrary opinion: on the other side, is a limited freedom which
varies in degree between the occupied or controlled countries—e.g., Germany and
Britain—but, on the whole, permits some expression of opinion and liberty of ac-
tion. It is possible for a decisive idea to grow within a money-democracy; that
growth is not possible within a bolshevist prison. There is only one choice in Rus-
sia—the grave or the underground movement. This is the fact that settles this first
question between West and East.20

The ELF’s founders, however, were appalled by Mosley’s argument. Yockey

later recalled that, when he discovered that Mosley was ‘pro-Churchill and
pro-American, and anti-Russian à outrance, even to the extent of mobilizing
Europe to fight for American-Jewish victory over Russia, I left him’.21 The

18 Action, 27 March 1948, 2.

19 D. S. Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur: Mosley, Fascism and British Society, 1931–81 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press 1987), 240.
20 Oswald Mosley, The European Situation: The Third Force, Ramsbury, March 1950, 9.
21 Letter from Yockey to Wolfgang Sarg, 24 February 1953. Yockey’s views led Mosley lieuten-
ant A. Raven Thomson to describe him, in a 27 March 1953 letter to the American rightist H.
Keith Thompson, as a ‘brilliant young intellectual American expatriate with a strong anti-
American phobia . . . taking the view that the present American influence in Europe is more
damaging to European culture than the direct but alien threat of Communism from the East.
He joined our movement at the time of its founding in 1948 obviously in the hope of getting
our Chief to finance his book, which he refused to do so [sic] because it was full of Spenglerian
pessimism and was quite unnecessarily offensive to America.’ Both letters are in the H. Keith
Thompson Collection, Hoover Institute, Stanford, CA.
18 Patterns of Prejudice 36:3

deep personal bitterness between the ELF and Mosley can also be felt in Guy
Chesham’s 31 August 1949 ‘Memorandum of Dissociation’ from the UM.
In it, Chesham lashed out at Mosley, saying that ‘contrary to your promise’
the UM leader had not reviewed Imperium: ‘paper was not provided to the
author, contrary to your promise, and in spite of the fact that you were using
up political paper to publish politically useless aesthetic works.’ Moreover,
‘the character of the author was assailed with a bitterness and fury of the
order usually reserved for the heroic William Joyce’.22 The deep foreign policy
divide between the ELF and Mosley was underscored by The Proclamation
of London’s insistence that Europe remain neutral in any future war between
the United States and the Soviet Union.

Washington’s programme is to conscript the Europeans . . . and thus to spare the

jitterbugs of North America the losses of arduous campaigns against Russia . . . Do
they really think that Europeans will accomplish military wonders fighting against
one enemy of Europe on behalf of another? . . . Europe will never fight for any
extra-European force; Europe will never enter into any relationship in which it is
not master . . . No, Europe is no more interested in this projected war than in a
struggle between two Negro tribes in the Sudan.23

Anti-Americanism and the birth of the ELF

Rejecting Mosley’s pragmatic tilt towards American power, the ELF continu-
ally attacked the United States as the nation most under Jewish control. The
Proclamation of London argued that, with the election of ‘the monster’
Roosevelt (‘whose name is synonymous with the pinnacle of Jewish power in
the world’), the US ‘passed into the control of the Jewish Culture-State-Race-
People’ who used the ‘alien regime in Washington’ to advance the Jewish
‘mission of hatred, revenge, and destruction of the Western civilization’. As
for the supposed Soviet threat to Europe, the Red Army was only allowed on
to European soil ‘at the invitation of and with the assistance of the Washing-
ton regime’. Indeed, ‘only American intervention in the Second World War
prevented Europe from completely destroying Bolshevik Russia as a political
unit’.24
In the spring of 1948 Yockey and Chesham began laying the organiza-
tional basis for what would become the ELF in an atmosphere that seemed
half cloak-and-dagger and half Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. The conspirators’ head-
quarters was a mansion-like house near Regent’s Park owned by the Baroness
Alice von Pflugl. (Von Pflugl, who was Yockey’s mistress, also helped finance
the publication of Imperium.) Chesham began contacting his friends inside
the UM, including Tony Gannon, a former BUF organizer in Manchester
who had been interned for about six months under Defense Regulation 18B.
After a series of political talks with Yockey at the baroness’s house, Gannon

22 Guy Chesham, ‘A Memorandum of Dissociation’, 31 August 1949: H. Keith Thompson

Collection, Hoover Institute, Stanford, CA.
23 The Proclamation of London.
24 Ibid.
 KEVIN COOGAN 19

became an eager co-conspirator. The group, however, lost its major source of
funding when Yockey and von Pflugl split up before the ELF’s official launch.
In the spring of 1949 Yockey wrote the text of The Proclamation of
London—which condensed Imperium’s arguments into pamphlet form—while
he was touring Belgium to promote Imperium. Yockey, Chesham and Gannon
next regrouped in the living room of Gannon’s Manchester home in the au-
tumn of 1949 for the ELF’s ‘founding conference’. Central to the ELF’s mission
was its call for a united Europe, as demonstrated by Yockey’s declaration in
his introduction to The Proclamation of London: ‘Throughout all Europe there
is stirring today a great superpersonal Idea, the Idea of the Imperium of
Europe, the permanent and perfect union of all the peoples and nations of
Europe.’ He also argued that

English, German, French, Italian, Spanish—these are now mere place names and
linguistic variations . . . Anyone who seeks to perpetuate petty-statism or old-fash-
ioned nationalism is the inner enemy of Europe . . . There is only one form of
treason now, treason to Europe. The nations are dead, for Europe is born.25

Despite the ELF’s emphasis on ideas, it would be wrong to reduce the

group to a purely ideological undertaking. All three co-founders saw them-
selves as part of a broader right-radical and neutralist current that was primarily
based in Germany. Yockey, for example, was in contact with Alfred Franke-
Gricksche, one of the leading neutralist theorists of the German far right and
a major figure in a shadowy but influential organization known as the
Bruderschaft.26 Chesham and Gannon also had strong European connections.27
The ELF’s anti-American stance, in fact, mirrored that of Germany’s overtly
neutralist Sozialistische Reichspartei (SRP), whose leader Otto Ernst Remer
gleefully proclaimed his utter lack of interest in helping the Allies fight the
Soviets. The SRP also gratefully accepted sub rosa financial aid from the East.
The ELF maintained good relations with the SRP, and Gannon discussed ELF
co-operation with the German group when one of its leading members (and
former Luftwaffe ace), Heinz Knoke, visited England in the early 1950s.

The ELF and the British Nazis

While the ELF met with acceptance among some elements of the German
extreme right, it would not enjoy similar success in neo-Nazis circles inside
Britain. During the time that Yockey and Gannon were planning the ELF,
they actively courted extreme-right elements in England already opposed to
Mosley, who was viewed as far too moderate. In November 1948 the British
far-rightist and Hitler-fan John Marston Gaster, a member of an antisemitic

25 Ibid.
26 For more on Yockey and Franke-Gricksche, see Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis
Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia 1999). For a
detailed look at the Bruderschaft, see Tauber.
27 Gannon, for example, supplied Yockey with a list of Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) con-
tacts before Yockey visited Italy.
20 Patterns of Prejudice 36:3

group called the North West Task Force, was invited to Baroness von Pflugl’s
home to hear a recruitment pitch from Yockey.28 Gaster later recalled how
Yockey ‘immediately launched into an attack on the Union Movement, which
he described as an instrument of US policy’. After praising both Spengler and
the pro-Russian conservative revolutionary Moeller van den Bruck, Yockey
announced that he was prepared ‘to collaborate with the Soviet Military Au-
thorities in action against the WESTERN occupying powers’. He also wanted to
create ‘a sensational newspaper, specializing in anti-American agitation’.29 In
July 1950 Gaster had another private meeting with Guy Chesham. Gaster
reported that Chesham

outlined a policy of infiltrating into all Nationalist groups with a view to seizing
control from within or organizing sabotage. The political direction of this activity
was to be violently anti-American, avoiding all anti-Bolshevik conceptions. No
anti-Jewish propaganda was to be permitted at first. It was further suggested that
forces could be raised in England for direct action against American military bases
in England. . . . if we organized successfully an anti-American front with popular
support it would become possible to obtain financial support from the Soviet em-
bassy in London.30

Gaster, however, was bitterly opposed to the ELF and only met with Chesham
in order to gather more information on the group’s plans.
After personally warning his friends about Yockey and Chesham, Gaster
next supplied critical inside information on the ELF to a far-right group known
as the Nationalist Information Bureau (or NATINFORM). NATINFORM then re-
leased a harshly critical report on Yockey and the ELF.31 A. F. X. Baron, a
far-right supporter of Arnold Leese, led NATINFORM’s English branch at the
time.32 Leese, a fanatical antisemite and the doyen of British Nazism, had long
despised Oswald Mosley. Yet he equally loathed the ELF, which he dismissed
as ‘Strasserist’. A Yockey essay entitled What Is Behind the Hanging of the
Eleven Jews in Prague?, first published in late 1952 under Yockey’s pseudo-
nym ‘Ulick Varange’, especially outraged Leese. Yockey’s tract gleefully
applauded the results of a Stalinist show trial in Prague that culminated in the
execution of leading members of the Czech Communist Party (many of them
Jewish) who were falsely accused of collaborating with ‘Zionists’, the CIA,
the Freemasons and British intelligence. Yockey proclaimed that with the
Prague trials the Soviet Union was now preparing to embrace antisemitism

28 The North West Task Force was active in Hendon and Edgeware in 1946–7. See Richard
Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918–1985 (London: Basil Blackwell 1987), 248.
29 For Gaster’s report, see Coogan, 172–4.
30 Ibid.
31 The report was released from NATINFORM’s ‘World Headquarters’ in Germany. NATINFORM’s
German branch, headed by Wolfgang Sarg, was also highly critical of the Franke-Gricksche
faction inside the Bruderschaft. For more on NATINFORM, see Coogan, and Tauber.
32 In 1948 Leese’s supporters tried to establish a new group, the National Workers Party, with
Baron as nominal leader while Leese maintained real control. See David Renton, Fascism,
Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s (London: Macmillan 2000), 51.
 KEVIN COOGAN 21

publicly . ‘Today Pravda says, “Zionism is a tool of American imperialism”’,

Yockey wrote, but ‘tomorrow it will say, “American imperialism is the tool of
Zionism”’.33 Horrified at the essay, Leese (who believed that Communism it-
self was part of the ‘Jewish conspiracy’) labelled the ELF a ‘poisonous group’.34
Rejected at the outset by both Mosley and Leese, the ELF was largely
stillborn as a political cadre group. Yet, as a propaganda outlet, it was surpris-
ingly successful in getting its ideas circulated inside fascist circles. ELF articles,
for example, were translated and reprinted in Der Weg, a leading hard-line neo-
Nazi journal based in Argentina. Der Weg even carried Yockey’s article on the
Prague trials under the title ‘Stalin und die Juden’.35 Opposition to the ELF
inside the British right, however, largely reduced the group’s practical activity
to the production of Frontfighter. With Tony Gannon’s decision to move to
South America in 1954, the ELF came to an end as a functioning groupuscule.

Aftermath
In June 1960 Yockey committed suicide in a San Francisco jail cell a few weeks
after his arrest by the FBI.36 However, his opus Imperium—which inspired
the creation of the ELF—continues to be read in far-right circles to this day.
First republished in the United States by Truthseeker Press in 1962, Imperium
has been kept in print by Noontide Press, the publishing house created by
Willis Carto. Carto, the founder of both the Liberty Lobby and the Institute
for Historical Review as well as the publisher of the far-right newsweekly
Spotlight, remains a highly significant figure inside the American far right.
German- and Spanish-language editions of Imperium have also appeared.
Despite Imperium’s popularity, the Anglo-Saxon right has largely ig-
nored Yockey’s strong anti-Americanism, as can be seen by the treatment of
the English translation of Yockey’s book Der Feind Europas (The Enemy of
Europe). Published in Germany in late 1953, Der Feind Europas had to ap-
pear in samizdat form due to its antisemitic content. However, the text is
particularly important in understanding the ELF, since it was originally in-
tended to appear as a section in the second volume of Imperium. What makes
Der Feind Europas striking is its polemical attack on capitalism as Europe’s
‘Inner Enemy’, as well as its openly pro-Soviet arguments. Despite Yockey’s
authorship, Carto refused to carry The Enemy of Europe (the first English
translation of Der Feind Europas) in the Noontide Press catalogue, because
he feared the book was ‘too anti-American’.37

33 What Is Behind the Hanging of the Eleven Jews in Prague? is available at the website
www.faem.com/yockey/yok52.htm (as of 20 May 2002).
34 Coogan, 510.
35 Der Weg, vol. 3, no. 2, February 1953. In the United States, Yockey’s article first appeared in
the December 1952 bulletin of the far-right National Renaissance Party.
36 For a full account of this episode, see Coogan, 32–44.
37 Liberty Bell Publications in Reedy, West Virginia first published The Enemy of Europe in
November 1981. It came with an almost book-length introduction by the late Revilo P. Oliver,
an important figure inside the racist right in the United States, that was critical of Yockey’s
assertions about both race and the Soviet Union.
22 Patterns of Prejudice 36:3

The well-known British rightist John Tyndall, who in the early 1960s
worked closely with Leese’s heir Colin Jordan in the British neo-Nazi move-
ment, expressed his own objections to Yockey in a review of The Enemy of
Europe in the August 1982 edition of Spearhead. Although an avowed ad-
mirer of much of Imperium, Tyndall argued that

Yockey, like other exponents of the European Union idea, such as Sir Oswald Mosley
(whom he briefly supported) seemed not to consider that if certain nations widely
differing from each other in race, language, history, sentiment, psychology, tradi-
tion and aptitude are lumped together in a melting pot, the contradictions between
them will constitute a source, not of strength, but of weakness . . . [I]t would be
better to transcend purely nationalistic loyalties with a greater loyalty, not to some
mere geographical area, but to the entire White Race whose territory today is no
longer synonymous with that area . . . The natural alignment for the future, there-
fore, is not, as Yockey would maintain, Imperium Europe as against Russia and
America, but the White World against the Non-White World.38

The Yockey revival

Yockey’s two most important ideological heirs come not from the English-
speaking world but from continental Europe. One was the Belgian far-rightist
and former Nazi collaborator Jean-François Thiriart, best known as the
founder and leader of Jeune Europe. Thiriart knew Mosley and participated
with him in a Eurofascist conference held in Venice in 1962. In the mid-1960s,
however, Thiriart began making strong overtures to the ‘anti-imperialist left’,
even meeting with China’s Chou En-lai in Romania. He also began openly
supporting Castro, the Vietnamese and the Palestinians (the PFLP in particu-
lar) in an attempt to unite the left and right against Europe’s ‘American
occupiers’.39 Thiriart also encouraged his supporters to study Yockey’s
ideas.40
The leading French New Rightist Alain de Benoist, a founder of the
French New Right think-tank GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et
d’Études pour la Civilization Européenne) and its publication Nouvelle Ecole,
has also been influenced by Yockey’s writings. In the early 1960s de Benoist
was associated with Europe-Action, a publication affiliated with the Fédération
des Étudiants Nationalistes (FEN), a rightist groupuscule headed by
Dominique Venner. Europe-Action, which adopted an overtly Euro-nation-
alist view after the French defeat in Algeria, openly praised Yockey. Then in
1965—using the name ‘Fabrice Laroche’—de Benoist became a contributing
editor to Western Destiny, a California-based publication founded by Willis

38 In his review, Tyndall also makes clear his admiration for Revilo P. Oliver.
39 Shortly before his death in 1992, Thiriart visited Moscow where he held discussions with
Communist hard-liners as well as with the Russian New Right leader Aleksandr Dugin.
40 When asked how he first learned about Yockey, Christian Bouchet, one of the leaders of the
new ELF, replied: ‘I read about him when Jean Thiriart, who was the leader of Jeune Europe
in the 60s, sent me a Xerox of his books and it confirmed a lot of my convictions’ (The Nexus,
no. 6, November 1996). Kerry Bolton, the New Zealand-based publisher of The Nexus (now
renamed Western Destiny), also heavily promotes Yockey’s works.
 KEVIN COOGAN 23

Carto that devoutly propagated Yockey’s ideas.41 De Benoist’s arguments in

Nouvelle Ecole in the 1980s that American culture posed a far greater threat
to Europe than Soviet troops, as well as his promotion of a culturally based
pan-European identity, clearly echo ideas earlier advanced by the ELF. Even
the New Right concept of a decentralized ‘Europe of a Hundred Flags’ is
itself premised on an Imperium-like superstructure (such as a model based on
the Austro-Hungarian Empire).

Echoes of Imperium
In hindsight, what seems most instructive about the ELF is just how much its
origin—as well as its demise—was determined by the hard realities of Cold
War geopolitics. Although Yockey and Mosley were in agreement about the
need for a new ‘Eurofascist’ model as the starting point for renewed political
action, not even the most fervent rhetorical calls to European unity could
transcend the reality of the US–Soviet conflict at a time when foreign policy
differences took on an almost life or death intensity. Today, the chasm that
split Europe in two for almost fifty years has closed. Both the end of the Cold
War and the emergence of the United States as the last remaining superpower
have escalated the search for new political tactics inside the far right. Thus it is
not completely surprising that the ELF has recently been rediscovered by a
new generation of European far-rightists who identify the United States as
‘the enemy of Europe’. Paradoxically, then, the ELF’s influence as an organ-
ized groupuscule on the European far right may grow stronger in the next
few years than it ever did during its brief existence almost half a century ago.

KEVIN COOGAN, a long-time investigative journalist, is the author of Dreamer of the

Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International.

41 Western Destiny was the successor publication to Carto’s journal Right as well as Northern
World and Folk, two publications associated with the Northern League for Pan-Nordic Friend-
ship. The Northern League, formed in the late 1950s by an Englishman named Roger Pearson,
included Carto as an early member. For more on Carto, Pearson, the Northern League and
Western Destiny, see Coogan, and Frank Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right:
Race, Conspiracy, and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1985).