The Northwest Novels of H. A. Covington

3,012 words

German translation here

Editor’s Note:

This essay is taken from in Dr. O’Meara’s new book Toward the White Republic, available here. Only a few copies of the limited signed and numbered hardcover edition are available.

“Those who want to live, let them fight, and
those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.”
—Adolf Hitler

H. A. Covington’s Northwest Trilogy of novels—Hill of the Ravens (2003), A Distant Thunder (2004), and A Mighty Fortress (2005) [A fourth novel, The Brigade (2007) appeared after this essay was written—Ed.]—now represents the most authoritative treatment of white separatism in the English language. Both as popular fiction and political tract, it is a remarkable work. But most remarkable of all is the utter silence that surrounds it. If not for a VNN “commentator” (the wise and judicious “New America”), I might never have heard of it.

I’m not quite certain why this is. Covington’s Trilogy is infinitely more readable and convincing than William Pierce’s Turner Diaries (now one of our classics), but has probably sold only a fraction as many copies. Part of the problem with its reception might lie in the fact that Covington, a veteran of the NS movement, has made not a few enemies within “the racially conscious community,” evident in his numerous critical references to William Pierce, as well as to Matt Koehl, Ben Klassen, Tom Metzger, David Duke, Martin Webster, John Tyndall, and others.

Without any actual knowledge of Covington’s personal history or of the sectarian squabbles that have alienated him from other racial nationalists, there may be, for this reason, a subtext to his Trilogy that eludes me.

I only know the Trilogy as a work of political fiction.

On this basis, though, I can categorically say that Covington is a great talent and that his work speaks, as no other does, to the burning question of our age.

Political fiction has one overriding purpose: to reach those who can’t be reached through rational discourse. In this, Covington’s Trilogy is superb. It is full of memorable characters—classic American types (daring, two-fisted white men) who remind us of our ancestors and not the ridiculous creatures we see on nightly television. It abounds with actions and adventures that evoke our earliest racial memories and reveal what we can be once free of the Jews’ lunar spirit. It conveys the ideals of our movement in a language and style accessible to those who might otherwise ignore them. It tells an exciting story that is both entertaining and didactic. But above all it imagines a course of action—perhaps the one possible course of action—that will ensure our existence as a people. Whatever one may say of Covington the activist, it has to be acknowledged that he’s made a work of art of his separatist vision, and it deserves a hearing.

It is not, though, his art that I want to address in this essay, but rather certain of his ideas, three of which I think are fundamental to the politics of white racial survival in this period. To put these ideas in their proper context, something, though, needs first to be said of the story Covington tells.

As a separatist, he believes the present situation is such that any hope of reversing America’s “de-Europeanization” or replacing the Judeo-globalist regime in Washington responsible for it is no longer feasible. The sole option left to whites seeking to ensure their existence in North America is to break off a portion of the lands their ancestors possessed and establish a white homeland. To this end he proposes the “migration” of racially aware whites to the Pacific Northwest—the whitest section of the United States—to create there the critical mass that will be needed once the time comes to wage an anti-colonial war against the Washington regime.

Premised on this migration, his three novels revolve around events that occur sometime in the second or third decade of the 21st century, when all the tendencies presently in place have been taken to their horrific and ethnocidal extension.

For reasons almost providential, whites in Coeur d’Alene Idaho finally rebel, when they spontaneously resist federal agents attempting to carry off the children of a politically incorrect but well-regarded family. Locally based members of the “party” created by the migration then intervene. They help arm, organize, and lead several hundred Coeur d’Alene whites against the troops sent in to crush them. Their rebellion is quickly quashed, but, like Ireland’s Easter Uprising, it ignites a war for national independence.

From three different perspectives Covington tells the story of the Northwest Volunteer Army (NVA), as it leads an IRA-style terror campaign against the Judeo-globalist forces in control of the United States. The NVA’s struggle is greatly facilitated by the fact that in this future period American society and the US government have become even more incompetent than they are today. The US military is bogged down in endless Mideastern wars fought on Israel’s behalf; its social system is increasingly dysfunctional, balkanized into rival racial-ethnic interest groups; an ever-growing part of the white population, unable to compete with coolie labor, is condemned to unemployment or conscription; and the material prosperity that has long served as a race-obliterating opiate has given way to the growing impoverishment and alienation of the white masses.

For five bitter years, the NVA wages the “war of the flea,” blowing up key infrastructure, sabotaging databases, attacking the regime’s tax-collecting and judiciary agents, intimidating employers of non-white labor—even sending Volunteers to disrupt the vulnerable lifelines that allow New York and Washington to function as the regime’s central nervous system.

Unable to sustain the damages and disruptions of these assaults, the federal government, mainly for financial reasons, is eventually forced to negotiate a peace settlement with the insurgents, negotiations which end up sanctioning the secession of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho (along with parts of Northern California, Wyoming, and Montana) from the United States and the establishment of a white homeland under the political auspices of a Northwest American Republic.

1. The Jewnited States

Thomas Hart Benton, “Lewis and Clark at Eagle Creek,” 1967

Unlike racial conservatives and not a few white nationalists, Covington sees the United States—not just the current Administration, but the “System” itself—as the enemy. He calls it “the fount and wellspring of all that [is] evil” in our time. For at least two generations this state has carried out a systemic assault on European America, forcing it to congregate with hostile races; promoting integration, miscegenation, and the destruction of the white family; adopting policies that siphon off its wealth, pollute its culture, and corrupt its children; but above all, legitimating its self-destruction through the imposition of dysgenic behaviors and values.

With “only the most remote and tenuous historical connection with the country and system of government which was originally established and envisioned by the Founding Fathers,” the United States today has become a Jew-led corporate plutocracy that denies whites their birthright. But it’s not just its state, with its race-destroying policies, that wars on them. The entire American social system—the reigning civilizational forms—have become no less noxious to their existence. Covington describes early 21st-century America (and this is a projection of current trends) as

a world of unspeakably vile sexual perversions . . . a kleptocracy, quite literally ruled by criminals, some of whom were so bad and so blatant that they were even indicted under the Americans’ own laws . . . a world based on no other foundation than sheer greed, wallowing in the most gross and despicable material gluttony . . . a wasteland of spiritual emptiness, moral corruption, and cultural pollution . . . an entire society based on a bizarre and grotesque moral inversion: the utterly ridiculous and thoroughly evil idea that all humanoid creatures are in some manner equal.

This world born of the Jews’ materialistic metaphysics—this world in which man is viewed primarily as “an economic animal rather than as a spiritual being with a soul” —turns everyone into either a consumer or a commodity and everything that has traditionally made life worth living—family, community, religion—into an economic calculation. Whether rich or poor, the “citizens” of this Jewified enterprise live “all doped up, dumbed down, zoned out . . . confused, hostile, paranoid . . . looking out for nobody but Number One.” America’s traditional European life forms become not only unsustainable under such a system, they are demonized and rendered criminal.

No self-respecting white man, Covington assumes, would want to preserve, reform, or redeem such an abomination. As one of his Volunteers says: “I didn’t want to be an American any more. I wanted to be a man instead, a white man.”

2. A War of White Liberation

Albert Bierstadt, “Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast,” 1870

Despite the passivity and conservatism that mark much of the racially conscious community, it is not difficult to understand why our nobler spirits would want to wash their hands of the American experiment.

With some justice, Covington argues that a half century of peaceful, legal methods to reverse the racial policies of the United States have been totally ineffective. “Petitions have been ignored . . . The electoral and political process has been undermined . . . The judiciary has become an instrument of racial and social tyranny.” All the while, the reigning powers continue their de-Europeanization, using all their vast powers to re-engineer the American population and eviscerate its racial heritage.

Covington’s work rests on the rather unchallengeable contention that nothing so far has had the slightest effect in stemming the enveloping tide of mud. Efforts to create an alternative media, raise white consciousness, mobilize voters around racial issues, or post another illuminating exposé on the internet have had virtually no effect in halting our advance toward the abyss. Those among us who continue to emphasize the need to educate or awaken people, he argues, usually end up doing “nothing more than hide behind an email address while playing with the computer in one’s basement rec room, with a bowl of nachos and a cold brewski beside the mouse.” Relatedly, most actual efforts by racialists and right-wingers to act in the real world continue to aim at influencing the Judeo-corporate system, rather than getting free of it.

Given that all the forces of indoctrination, socialization, and influence are in enemy hands and that all the principal institutions and social-economic structures are arrayed against us, the thought of using the system’s established forms to bring down the anti-white regime in Washington, repatriate the 100 million muds occupying our lands, or reverse the present ethnocidal course of American developments is nothing short of fantastic. Given also that every effort to reverse American racial policy has failed and that this policy threatens the survival of the European race in North America, the sole remaining recourse, Covington insists, is the “right” to take up arms against the system threatening us.

As he imagines it, the struggle to establish an independent white homeland in the American Northwest will resemble an anti-colonial war, waged in ways not unlike the campaign the Provisional IRA carried out against the British government in Northern Ireland after 1969. Sustained by a migration of racially aware whites to the region (Covington mentions 50,000 migrants), the NVA that is to arise from some future effort to acquire a “small piece of territory” will challenge Washington’s monopoly of armed force and undermine its revenue producing sources, making it impossible for the federal government to maintain its authority over the Pacific Northwest.

But how realistic is such a prospective struggle? To many it will seem even more fantastic than the alternatives that Covington criticizes. And to those who know something about the physical-force wing of Irish Republicanism, it will seem no less fantastic to imagine that American white nationalists (whose struggles are waged almost entirely in cyberspace) could emulate the IRA gunmen, street fighters, and terrorists who forced Her Majesty’s Government to the negotiating tables.

These objections, however, are not actually an argument against Covington’s notion of a white liberation struggle—only an obstacle to be overcome. History, moreover, is full of improbable undertakings. Who would have thought that 10,000 lightly-armed Sunni insurgents would check the conquests of America’s imperial legions? Great historical transformations are almost always implausible until they happen. Part of this is due to the fact that it is rarely the size of one’s armed divisions or the quality of one’s military technology that matters most, but rather certain qualities of the human spirit. As Victor Hugo put it: “Mightier than the tread of marching armies is the power of an idea whose time has come.” If American whites, especially their racially conscious vanguard, should ever imbue the NW migration with the force of a Sorelian myth (that is, with the force to act), there is simply no telling what might happen. “Nothing is impossible”—not even the thought of white men marching to the sound of the guns.

To those who would dismiss this as wishful thinking, it might be added that not only does the survival of the white race depend upon such a mythic transformation of white consciousness, but that our age has turned such transformations into something of a Zeitgeist. With the advent of globalization and the fourth-generation war it provokes, traditional state systems have everywhere gone into crisis, as anti-national elites endeavor to impose a one-world superstate that reduces everything to the market demands of the Jew-led Yankee money men cashing in on the extermination of the white race.

The idea of a white liberation struggle is not, then, entirely implausible. Nor would there be any lack of potential Volunteers. Sections of the middle class, deprived by globalization of the lifestyles which ensured their former passivity, are already feeling embittered and by-passed. A sharp economic downturn, the collapse of the dollar, a humiliating military retreat from the Middle East, an energy crisis that undermines our automotive civilization, a protracted governmental paralysis—the conditions could suddenly arise when elements among the complacent, TV-programmed white masses are forced to the conclusion that their allegiances are misplaced. In any case, conditions for whites are almost certain to continue to deteriorate.

Echoing the theorists of partisan, guerrilla, or asymmetrical warfare of the last half century, Covington contends that the bigger and more complex the Jewnited States becomes, the more vulnerable it is to “a few brave men with weapons in their hands and the courage to use them.” American society, he notes, is “so complex, everything so interactive and interlocking and dependent on everything else, that when you cut one link in the chain the whole works just grounds to a halt.”

The struggle for white liberation would also benefit from the fact that the US government is already a corrupt, mismanaged institution and that American society, premised on purely economic criteria, lacks real cohesion. The whole system, in fact, rests on a foundation of sand. All the powers of corruption, incompetence, cowardice, and short-term thinking conspire against it. (Think of Katrina New Orleans.) Its declining revenues and budget constraints are even now making it difficult to fund its repressive apparatus. At the same time, the system is more and more served by inept Negroes, and the Jews who manage the system’s decision-making centers are beginning to overreach themselves, pushing their host people in ways that formerly ended in pogroms. Is it so inconceivable, then, to think that an armed white opposition could force it out of the Northwest?

3. A Homeland

Thomas Hart Benton, “Wheat,” 1967

Once it is accepted that the United States constitutes the principal threat to white existence and that whites will be free of its perverse, ethnocidal policies only through force of arms, then the third, most crucial facet of Covington’s vision comes into focus: The imperative of creating a white homeland.

Terre et Peuple, Blut und Boden: The notion that every people needs its own land is as old as Europe itself. In the postmodern, transnational, and global order favored by our one-world elites such a notion, of course, is deemed obsolete, as if the quantitative monetary principles of the world market are a better way of organizing social life than traditional ones based on healthy families, organic communities, and ethnoracial identities.

In the last generation, this ancient notion has assumed a new urgency: For the rising tide of color has everywhere begun to seep into the former white homelands, threatening the integrity of white life. One more generation of Third World immigration and the great race passes away forever.

A racially exclusive homeland, the antithesis of the New World Order, would in Covington’s view be our “ark to weather the great flood of mud.” “It is absolutely essential,” he argues, “that the white race acquire a Homeland of its own, some place on earth where white children can be born and raised in physical and spiritual safety, and where our numbers may be restored and the threat of racial extinction overcome.”

Based on blood, not creed or economics, such a home-land would guarantee the perpetuity of our people. It would also solve a great many of the social, political, and cultural problems that presently ail us. For once free of the Jews who have pathologized white existence and who have set the colored hordes on us, we could begin dealing honestly and forthrightly with the problems besetting our civilization. Indeed, once free of the Jews and their multiracial legions, many of these problems would simply vanish. The result would almost certainly be a renaissance of European life in North America. As one of Covington’s characters observes: “When you have stability and unity in a racially homogenous society . . . you’d be amazed what a small country like ours can accomplish.”

This vision of a sovereign Aryan Republic is, of course, merely a figment of Covington’s imagination, but then again imagination, as Shakespeare reminds us, “Bodies forth the things unknown.”

Bibliographical Note:

The novels of the Northwest Quartet are:

H. A. Covington
The Hill of the Ravens
Lincoln, Nebr.: 1stBooks Library, 2003

H. A. Covington
A Distant Thunder
Bloomington, Ind.: Authorhouse, 2004

H. A. Covington
A Mighty Fortress
Bloomington, Ind.: Authorhouse, 2005

H. A. Covington
The Brigade
Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2008