Charles Ciroan, father of Synarchism

Charles Artimus Ciroan (1920-2002) was a writer, philosopher and teacher. He was the foremost proponent of a post-World War II form of fascism called Synarchism which combined elements of corporatism with Third Position foreign policy.

He was born in Pretoria, South Africa the son of a Belgian geologist father and an American mother. After serving in the South African Army, Ciroan migrated to the United States to study international law at Georgetown University. Although he was against the conflict, when the U.S. entered World War II, Ciroan volunteered for duty and was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) and made a Field Intelligence Officer. His position had him conduct “first contact” field interrogations of enemy soldiers and officers, analyze the information he culled and write reports for Army Intelligence. He served in North Africa, Italy and in France.

After the war, Ciroan was asked to join the American effort to prosecute Nazis for war crimes. Instead, he went to work for Oskar Manderscheid’s group which was organized to defend the accused. This stunned those whom Ciroan had worked for because he was considered a superb officer and intelligence operative who could have had a substantial career in the post-war CIA. But Ciroan not only opposed the trials but felt that the U.S. was duplicitous in war crimes of its own (Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, among others) and lacked the moral authority to stand in judgment of the vanquished.

Ciroan was not a Nazi, but, like many in the 1930s, he had admired Mussolini’s corporate state. He arrived at his sympathy for fascism through Nietzsche, American philosopher William James, Catholic Distributism and Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre’s ideas about Synarchy.

His principled stand against post-war U.S. policy hurt Ciroan’s career hopes and put him under both CIA and FBI surveillance from 1945 to 1973. An anti-communist, he tried to join Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s legal team as an investigator but was turned down for his link to Manderscheid and the Nazi defense team. He ultimately carved out a career in academia from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s.

Ciroan scorned democracy as promoting a heard mentality that aimed at the lowest common denominator and creating instability. He was also an elitist who realized that men naturally organize themselves in hierarchies. Although he had come to admire capitalism’s ability to deliver the goods, he saw it as more revolutionary than communism and totally destructive of sound traditions.

This distrust of democratic capitalism led him to develop Synarchism. Synarchism can best be described as a pragmatic form of corporatism that relied on many market-driven strategies as well as a management approach known as Telesis, defined as an intelligent planning of the means to achieve a desired end. Synarchism rejected the imperialism and militarism which so characterized interwar fascism. It also sought to steer a third way between the either/or of Soviet communism and American state capitalism in the Cold War era. Naturally, both these ideas were highly controversial and well outside the mainstream of American political thought in the 1950s. However, from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, he did find a considerable audience of devoted students who would later attribute Ciroan to having a profound influence upon them. This influence was surprisingly broad and included members of the New Left as well many right-wingers as well.

In addition to hundreds of articles on a wide variety of subjects, Ciroan published several books which incorporated Synarchism in their themes. His first book, the scholarly Monarchy, Empire and Republic was published by the mainstream Beacon Books in 1955. Subsequent books, The Origins of Destiny (1958) and Heed the Thunder (1962) which were less academic and more overt in their examination of fascism and synarchy, were published by American fascist George Lyndow’s Spearhead Press. His books, while brilliant, entertaining and highly readable, were also far-rambling polemics which placed every point within the context of history and philosophy. Lyndow claimed that Ciroan helped Francis Parker Yockey pen his fascist opus Imperium. In fact, Imperium bears such a striking similarity to earlier Ciroan works that some feel he wrote it himself although Ciroan always denied it.

A devout Catholic, Ciroan married twice (his first wife, Naomi Lavan died in 1957), and fathered three children. He died of cancer at his retirement home in Florida in 2002 while working on his memoirs, which, tragically, he had yet to finish.

Many of those who have written about Charles Ciroan have put their gross ignorance of him and his beliefs on ample display. Because he was sympathetic to corpratism and helped defend Nazis at the Nuremberg trials, commentators put two and two together and came up with eighteen. Ciroan was a staunch anti-Nazi and condemned the Italian Fascists for allying themselves with him. His feelings about the Nuremberg trials were virtually the same as Sen. Robert Taft who condemned them as victor's justice in which the people who won the war were the prosecutors, the judges and the alleged victims, all at the same time. Taft condemned the trials as a violation of the most basic principles of American justice and internationally accepted standards of justice. But Ciroan went futher to note that the allies had also committed crimes during the war -- crimes of policy -- and that vetoed any moral authority they had over the Nazis. Ciroan pointed out (the charge is in his books and well substantiated) that the USSR had helped start the war and had divided Poland between it and Germany, how could it sit in judgement of the Germans who were once their allies?

As stated, his principaled stance ruined any hopes he had of a real career in American politics and government. He could have been a real boon to the anti-communist cause and McCarthy personally could have used his expertise. Ciroan could have been the head of the CIA, secretary of state or a terrific senator, but it never happened. He often said he never regretted his stand or the fallout it caused, but a trace of disappointment was always evident.