But for Carto the danger had not been limited to World War II: “If Satan himself had tried to create a permanent disintegration and force for the destruction of nations, he could have done no better than to invent the Jews.”{39} In a memo Carto expressed it even more succinctly: The Jews were “Public Enemy No. I.”{40}
The essence of Carto’s political philosophy and his introduction to Holocaust denial can be traced to Imperium—The Philosophy of History and Politics, by Francis Parker Yockey. The book, dedicated to Adolf Hitler, preached that the future greatness of the West would be modeled on the German “revolution” of 1933. Yockey, who has been described by some researchers as “America’s Hitler,” was born in 1917 in Chicago. After attending five different colleges, he graduated from Notre Dame Law School.{41} He enlisted in the army in 1942 and went AWOL for an extended period shortly thereafter. He was eventually given a medical discharge from the army in 1943 on the grounds that he suffered from “dementia praecox, paranoid type.” According to the army report, he revealed marked delusions of persecution, had auditory hallucinations, and involved prominent people in his delusional system.{42}
In 1945, after the war, he took a job as a legal researcher for the War Crimes Tribunal in Germany. He left that post in less than a year because of what he claimed was the tribunal’s unfair treatment of the Nazi leaders awaiting trial. He subsequently went to Ireland, where he wrote Imperium. In 1952 his passport was revoked in absentia by the State Department, and by 1954 he was identified as a U.S. agent for a neo-Nazi, Rudolph Aschenauer.{43} After writing Imperium he traveled throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Egypt spreading its message. He was arrested in 1960 when he was discovered to be holding three different passports with three different names. (His suitcase had been lost by an airline company. When it was retrieved, airport officials opened it to discover the identity of its owner. Instead they found the passports.) While in prison awaiting trial, Yockey took a cyanide pill and committed suicide. His last visitor, less than a week earlier, was Carto.
In Imperium Yockey called for an absolute imperial system, an imperium of Western Aryan nations united by the principles of Hitlerian national socialism. Yockey envisaged a time when power would no longer be held by individuals and all enterprises would be under public control and ownership. The regime Yockey proposed envisioned the death knell of democracy. He called for an age of absolute politics in which elections would become old-fashioned until they ceased altogether.{44}
It is the book’s antisemitic ideology that harks back most directly to national socialism. “The Jew is spiritually worn out,” according to Yockey. “He can no longer develop. He can produce nothing in the sphere of thought or research. He lives solely with the idea of revenge on the nations of the white European-American race.”{45} Obsessed with the power of the Jews, Yockey warned that they were bound to destroy the West. Imperium is filled with descriptions of conspiracies against both the West and the United States. It christened those orchestrating these conspiracies as the “Culture-Distorters.” Included in their ranks were racial and cultural misceganists, egalitarians, believers in human rights and participatory democracy, and “the rear-guard in the West of the fulfilled Arabian Culture, the Church-State-Nation-People-Race of the Jew.”{46}
In 1949 Yockey wrote the “Proclamation of London,” which, in addition to calling for the reinstatement of national socialism, advocated the expulsion of the Jews by the nations of Europe. (In a sworn deposition in 1979, in a Liberty Lobby lawsuit against the ADL, Carto acknowledged under oath that he agreed with the tenets of Yockey’s proclamation.{47})
But Yockey went beyond even this most extreme antisemitic rhetoric. Twenty years prior to the formation of the IHR, Yockey laid out the essential elements of Holocaust denial. He attributed the myth of the Holocaust to the culture-distorters’ claim that six million Jews had been killed in European camps. Not only had they made this claim, Yockey charged, but they had woven a web of propaganda that was technically quite complete:
“Photographs” were supplied in millions of copies. Thousands of the people who had been killed published accounts of their experiences in these camps. Hundreds of thousands more made fortunes in post-war black markets. “Gas-chambers” that did not exist were photographed and a “gasmobile” was invented to titillate the mechanically minded.{48}
Yockey’s book might have had little if any impact if not for the fact that in 1962 Noontide Press reissued it with a thirty-five-page introduction by Carto in which he expressed profound support for Yockey’s plans for world rule and contended that in order to obtain the necessary political power “all else must be temporarily sacrificed.”{49} Noontide has kept the book in circulation since then.
During the late 1960s Carto participated in the creation of a number of political groups to advance his agenda of winning control of America’s right wing. The United Republicans for America, which was designed to win control of the Republican party, conducted a direct-mail campaign for G. Gordon Liddy’s congressional race in New York. (Liddy would shortly thereafter become infamous for his role in the Watergate break-in.) He also helped found Youth for Wallace, which, after supporting George Wallace’s presidential aspirations, became the National Youth Alliance (NYA). Officially the goals of the NYA were to oppose drugs, black power, the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and American involvement in foreign wars. But another item was on the organization’s agenda. According to former officials of the organization, who were drummed out by Carto when they protested, the NYA advocated Francis Yockey’s philosophy. Paperback copies of Imperium were printed for NYA members to sell. An NYA informational letter acknowledged that the organization’s political approach was based on the philosophy of Yockey’s “monumental Imperium.”{50} At a 1968 meeting of the NYA in Pittsburgh at which Nazi paraphernalia were evident and Nazi songs sung, Carto praised Yockey’s ideas and described his own plan to amass as much political power as possible within an array of institutions. Anticipating a national swing to the right, he aimed to capture the leadership of as many conservative groups as possible. A former Liberty Lobby staffer who hosted its radio show testified in court that Carto often indicated that what this country needed was a “right-wing dictatorship.”{51} Because leaders of the “legitimate right,” such as William F. Buckley, constituted an obstacle to his plan to win control of the conservative right Carto labeled them with the most extreme term of opprobrium he could conjure up: “ADL agents.”{52} The publications linked to Carto and his organizational orbit disseminated plans for this right-wing dictatorship and called for active suppression of those who would conspire against it.