Customer Reviews

The Enemy Of Europe/The Enemy of Our Enemies

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The translator of the Yockey essay gave me a copy of the first edition of this book some twenty years ago. From what I can tell from the sample pages, this edition is just a reprint of the original, with a new cover.

Why the Yockey essay needed translation is an interesting story in itself, which Professor Oliver briefly recounts in his companion piece. Yockey, an American, wrote The Enemy of Europe in English and then translated it (or had it translated) for publication in Berlin in the early 1950s.The plates of the German book were destroyed and the English original entirely disappeared. However, one copy of the German typescript survived, and this was then "retroverted" into a slightly stilted Anglo-American idiom. Not a perfect replication of the original, but as good an approximation as was possible to attain.

Oliver's essay is vintage RPO--feisty, erudite, entertaining, viperish. Yockey's piece may be inaccessible to most people who haven't read any of his other writings. His political stance really defies categorization. He was a man of neither the left nor the right, a visionary without any slogans or nostrums for the immediate future. The uninitiated will find him an infuriating mass of contradictions. For example, the enemy of Europe referred to in the title is the United States of America. But Yockey was himself a patriotic American as well as a Europe-firster. To explain how all this fits together one would have to give a detailed analysis of Yockey's philosophy of history.

The closest thing we have to a present-day Yockey is Spengler--not Oswald, but the columnist in the Asia Times (atimes.com). If you don't have the stomach for Spengler in the Asia Times, then don't go anywhere near Yockey.

Francis Parker Yockey's 'Imperium' is probably the single greatest philosophical & political work since Plato's 'The Republic.' Unfortunately, its somewhat dense, overly subtle, rather lengthy, and frankly too difficult for many people to read. This book, which Yockey intended as a sort of explanatory epilogue to 'Imperium,' may be better suited for the purpose of inspiring already committed souls, and winning new minds to the sacred cause of the West. The fact that this volume contains a lengthy discourse on its contents by yet another of the foremost intellectuals and patriots of the post-1945 era, Dr. Revilo P. Oliver, is a much appreciated bonus.