“You Owe Them Everything!”
A Review of Spencer Quinn’s Charity’s Blade

John Everett Millais’ Joan of Arc, The Maid of Orléans (1865)

3,902 words

I have both the pleasure of informing Counter-Currents readers of an upcoming novel authored by Mr. Spencer Quinn and of reviewing this latest addition to white nationalist-friendly fiction. When critiquing an author (especially for the first time), I like to get a sense of his Weltanschauung by reading and synthesizing some of his other works in conjunction with the monograph in question. Thus, I will also refer throughout to a few of his salient articles.

There is much to choose from, for Spencer Quinn has been a busy man. In a matter of months, he has published several pieces for Counter-Currents, including: “This Is Why We Had Segregation” and “Trump Should Wargame Secession, Too,” both of which were provocative essays, and the latter having more than a little to do with the novel under review. Additionally, Mr. Quinn has written and published poetry and a children’s book: My Mirror Tells a Story. The kind of range and discipline marshaled to complete each of these in rapid succession, and without sacrificing the quality of his writing, is admirable. And contrary to the “appropriation” moral-panic that has swept the creative occupations (very loosely defined), I respect authors who make attempts to write outside of their own experience. Note that blacks have always lacked either the capability or the desire to write about anything save black concerns — a narcissism that requires the least amount of imagination, insight, and work. Quinn, meanwhile, undertook the challenge of writing his forthcoming novel Charity’s Blade from a female perspective (I’m assuming that Mr. Quinn is not a woman using a male nom de guerre).

And he has contributed to a deep tradition in Western culture, for the West has long had a soft spot for the heroine. Woman may naturally tend toward conformity and the hearth, but when she has taken up public causes, few have matched her implacable defiance. She has inspired a certain kind of awe from her male admirers — an appreciation (as well as a discomfort, perhaps) for her combination of fierceness and femininity. J’eanne d’Arc (to whom the book makes obvious references), Queen Boudicca, Isabel d’Espagne, Aliénor d’Aquitaine (awesome or infamous, depending on one’s point-of-view), Diana and Unity Mitford, and Ursula Haverbeck come immediately to mind. Literary heroines have included Danish writer Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), a supporter of aristocratic beauty over democratic grayness, and the leading lady of her memoirs Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass; Scarlett O’Hara of Civil-War era Georgia; Antigone of Sophocles’ ancient drama; as well as the many martyr-saints, goddesses, and warrior-women celebrated in Catholic, Greek, Norse, Russian, and German folklore. During times of acute crisis and dire need — when her people were threatened with death and defeat, she has often emerged to inspire the resistance and awe of the men around her.

“Albion’s Seed Buckled”

Some of the “worst-case” scenarios in Quinn’s double-feature articles on “Wargaming Secession” came to pass in the future world of Charity’s Blade. The “assumption that the American political system, which was designed when whites held a demographic supermajority, would survive the next few elections as non-whites [took] up an ever-increasing share of the population [had proven] simply naïve.” [1] In the dystopian-utopian United States of tomorrowland, Antifa amassed power and the government grew more tyrannical — both were “terrorist organizations” that embarked on campaigns to annihilate white America. Their partisans “demolished bridges, dams, and infrastructure” in white areas “in order to disorganize, demoralize, and hobble” whites. “They shut off the lights in” some places, “before a city-wide, anti-white pogrom” commenced. [2] Most of Dixie, despite a valiant defense mounted by its proud, legacy sons, fell to the enemy, who then slaughtered its inhabitants and left a holocaust from rural Mississippi to the Blue Ridge and Tidewater coasts. Once the envy of the world, the United States had turned on its true people and had instead become Euro-Americans’ deadliest foe. By that time, I have to assume that trapped whites began to view Watchmen’s Ozymandias as a reasonable man. If only they, too, had a kill-switch to flip on New York City and Washington. [3] The American Curse, Metacom’s Revenge, had revived: the native Americans faced intra-racial treachery, alien immigrant invasion, and extinction — only this time, it was “Albion’s Seed” under the knife.

The first essay of Quinn’s that I can remember reading on Counter-Currents was his take-down of the 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans. I am aware that Mohicans had its problems: its faithfulness to both history and novel was lacking; it depicted almost all of the Europeans (save for the white colonists) as perfidious or pompous, while it lionized some Indian characters as “magical” and “tragic.” [4] But the majority of the red men in Mohicans were savages, and killed savagely; they took the scalps of women and children, and they cut out the hearts of white enemies (and unless viewers turned away, they watched it all — not in suggestive shadows on walls or vicariously through the horrified looks of other actors — but in bloody technicolor). Its love affair with the American landscape, the backwoods frontier, which in 1757 was the area just outside of Albany, New York, resulted in brilliant and beautiful shots of the North Carolina forests, creeks, and mountainsides. This, the film seemed to argue, was a fiercely lovely country and worth loving, fighting, and dying for in the fiercest manner.

Mohicans was remarkably candid about demographics and race replacement. Its strongest motif was an unwavering focus on biology, bloodlines, and sex. From Magua’s dark promise to “wipe ‘the Grey Hair’s’ [Colonel Munro’s] seed out forever”; to Cora’s defense of colonial grit in the face of British demands: “they [colonists] do not live their lives ‘by your leave.’ They hack it out of the wilderness with their own two hands, bearing their children along the way”; and finally, to the title and central theme itself: “The Last” of a once-proud people driven to extinction. Every scene made clear that the war was not between French General Montcalm and British Colonel Munro — nor between any white rivals. Those were sideshows to the ultimate race war and the ultimate race question: would whites or would Indians inherit America and people its land with their “seed,” their generations, and their culture(s) in the time yet to come?

Moreover, all of the interracial relationships in the movie were doomed. British treaties with Indians were fake. The French, more pragmatically, conceded this reality and recognized that their native “allies” fought alongside them out of convenience and self-interest. Montcalm knew that he had little control over Magua. The gentle flirtation between Uncas and Alice ended in death before it ever began. For all the familial affection between Chingachgook and his “white son,” Hawkeye; for all the tenuous alliances between Indian groups and their French “fathers,” it was clear: whites and Indians, they could not exist together. The final panorama hovered over Hawkeye and his chosen white love, Cora, both of them looking out into the promised land of the west. They, the old Mohican leader said in the voice of Fate, would live on. They were the strong ones who had survived the horrors of multiracial warfare. After the death of his son Uncas, Chingachgook’s “seed (along with Magua’s) was wiped out forever.” Could the racial message get any clearer than that? This was the stuff from which race-realism was made, and this is what awaits us down the path of amalgamation, racial-masochism, and immigration replacement. In light of this earlier example, whither “Albion’s seed?” [5] I encourage those who have disliked the movie to rewatch it with new eyes.

Why does this digression matter? The prequel of future ethnic-apocalypse or racial “civil wars” in America as depicted in Quinn’s novel will not be the nineteenth-century Civil War. In the 1860s, North and South were two halves of a genuine nation and composed of white citizens whose sections were populated by those born of similar blood and beliefs. Their conflicts were ones of lifeways and culture. No, the next civil war will mirror the colonial wars — those fought when an American nation did not exist, but its peoples were beset by imperial feuds and barbarous racial aliens. All this is to say that the wars to come will look like “King Philip’s War” and “The French and Indian War,” but with better artillery. They will bear little to no resemblance to our first “Civil War,” save perhaps the guerilla fighting that plagued some of the border-states. These future battles will revolve around extinction, bloodlines, and the central question: whose children will inherit the prize of Columbia? And indeed, this is the kind of “all against all” that had been consuming the North American continent for a generation at the opening of Charity’s Blade. [6]

“Could Any Goal So Noble Justify What She Was about To Do?”

Through Charity’s own memory, the narrator described how besieged whites managed to carve out an area roughly analogous to the 1803-1804 Louisiana Purchase territory (another nod to early America). They named this ethnostate “New Europa” (NE). Non-whites were banished from NE’s borders (New Europans allowed some mixed-race individuals and Indian tribes to seek sanctuary or to stay within its lands, but these groups enjoyed few political rights). NE did not suffer Antifa, nor ex-Antifa members to dwell inside its walls. Jews were ejected and, friendless for the umpteenth time in their history, those who survived fled to New York and presumably renamed it “New Israel.” Irregular fighting, meanwhile, continued in the borderland “Hot Zone” (if it is possible at this stage of the publishing process, I recommend the inclusion of a map). And just as in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, shady characters, go-betweens, and psychopaths operated in that contested and violent area between warring powers.

Against this turmoil, Charity’s narrative began, its first chapter introducing readers to Charity Keene — a young wife and mother living in smallville, NE. Before marriage and motherhood, she had fought as a scim-wielding soldier in the NE armed forces. [7] Eventually, authorities ordered all females discharged and sent away from the front, and so she “retired,” married, and went about the business of building a home in her new ethnostate — but she had demons to overcome before doing so. Her entire North Carolinian family had been killed during the United States’ mass-murder campaign in the South. The only loved ones she had left were her husband Gabe (a former and bitter hero of the wars that cost him his leg) and her dying, autistic son Weston. Although NE citizens were already on their way to building a prosperous country, NE’s status as a pariah state starved its people of access to things that white Americans before the war had taken for granted — things like good medicine. Weston suffered from a muscular-degenerative disease that threatened to kill him if left untreated. Since she had endured a hysterectomy following his birth, Charity knew that her sick little boy was her only hope of passing on her lineage — of keeping her dead relatives who had perished in the southern holocaust “alive.”

After searching for answers and seeking the opinions of any NE doctor willing to see her son, she heard rumors that a cure for Weston’s disease existed — a treatment that MDs had pioneered in Eastern Europe, and she grasped onto this tendril of faith with her entire being. But to get across the sea, she needed to wade into enemy territory and expose both herself and her son to countless dangers. Begging Gabe to let her go had not worked, and so she absconded, like a thief in the night, with Weston and an envelope full of cash, headed toward no-man’s land — toward that figment of hope, that panacea that lay beyond the horizon of a world on fire.

The trials she endured while on her odyssey were often sickening. In exchange for their aid and transport, an unscrupulous (and Jewy) group of pimps demanded payment through Charity’s prostitution — whoring that mostly serviced blacks and other non-whites in the “Hot-Zone.” Oh, no, I thought initially. She’s not really going to have to go through with this disgusting thing, is she? But go through with it, she did. I found it difficult to get past that, but mercifully, Quinn was not graphic in his descriptions of the episode. How much are you willing to give, Charity, so that your son might live?

“We Are a Nation . . . as Long as We Live Responsibly and Raise Children Properly”

While Charity was without doubt a devoted mother, the novel’s portrayal of the often thankless job of motherhood (and parenthood in general), was refreshingly honest. Calling Weston a “difficult” child would have been an understatement. His chronic tantrums, neediness, and odd propensity to mangle musical pieces while humming to himself taxed Charity’s patience. Once, and while making their escape from the pimps, Charity, her son, and a fellow-traveler stealthily crept their way toward a vehicle, praying they would avoid detection from those hunting them. Weston chose that moment to have a meltdown. He began wailing in fear and protest. So, Charity “did what a dark part of her had always wanted to do. She loaded up and punched him in the jaw. Weston dropped like a condemned building . . . crashing down to the floor,” unconscious. [8] This K-O haymaker did not scandalize me. Sure, they’re precious, and we need to start rebuilding our people’s population with white babies. But let’s face it: children can be the most irritating creatures on the planet. The Dissident Right has often advocated for the restoration of patriarchal sex roles, but a less-mentioned topic in our circles is the needed restoration of the adult-child patriarchy, for lately, the behavior of children (even white children) has become appalling. Spoiled and overly-indulged kids have become Marxists and trannies. At least Quinn’s Weston had an excuse for his conduct.

Indeed, the necessity of parental “tough love” was a recurring theme and animated my favorite passage — a flashback to Charity’s own teenage years. She recalled a moment of adolescent rebellion, when once she’d pinned to her bedroom wall a picture of a few colored boys on whom she’d developed a crush, and who all played for her high school’s basketball team. I’m sure she felt a delicious shiver race through her veins at the defiant act. Her parents were not amused. At first, her father tried remonstrating with her, using somewhat weak-willed and squishy language in his attempt to convince Charity to remove the poster. After a few moments of argument, he gave up. Charity’s mother, on the other hand, left with a face stern as death.

In the early morning hours the next day, Charity felt someone shaking her roughly awake. It was her mother. “Give me your hand,” the older woman commanded. Still drowsy and confused, Charity obeyed. And “Shortly after giving her mother her right hand . . . she felt a searing pain on her forearm. Something hard, smooth, and extremely hot was burning it . . . Julia held her daughter’s arm in place for what seemed like a sadistic two seconds before letting go.” Charity shrieked and tried to wriggle away, but her mother pinned her to the sheets and pointed the red-hot curling iron at her daughter’s face. The smell of burnt skin filled the crackling air. “Take down the poster,” Julia commanded in a composed, but “thin and mean” voice. “Now!” Charity tore it down in a panic, then fell to the floor in sobbing supplication. But her mother wasn’t finished. Her eyes were still hard when she rasped, “You best remember, young lady . . . that there are people who came into this family before you. And you owe them everything!” [9] These lines were perhaps the most important ones in the book. I can remember a similar conversation that took place between my east Texas mother and my ten-year-old self (granted, one that was more of a forewarning and without corporal punishment involved). In no uncertain terms was I to ever encourage or indulge in that kind of relationship. Thank you, Mother, for doing the right thing.

“Who Were Your Great-grandparents?”

In keeping with this theme, Charity (or Quinn’s third-person narrator) was fascinated by the presence of generations visible in the human face and spent many lines describing characters in terms of their old age or future old age — as if the entire cycle of youth, maturity, and elderhood passed before the viewer at a glance. A woman called “Sarah seemed to have thinned out in the cheeks and neck, hinting at the old-lady death’s head lurking underneath.” [10] Charity watched the fleeting expressions as they flashed across a youth’s face and  “assessed him as the man he had not yet become.” [11] In her mind, she recognized an auburn-haired prostitute “as hillbilly stock right away. Even though the woman seemed in her late thirties, the stress lines on her face revealed what she would look like in her seventies.” [12] But time and age did not change and flicker in the face of Yakov, the Jew, for Charity “could not imagine him young. Did Jews like Yakov spring from their mothers fully formed as entrepreneurial purveyors of flesh?” [13] This preoccupation had especial relevance to the novel’s main plotline: in his quiet moments, Charity’s son Weston sometimes appeared older to his mother, but she knew that he was doomed to die young — unless Charity could save him. Failure would mean that she would never truly know what Weston would grow up to be, what he would look like in his best years, save in the hints and shadows of his boy-face.

Charity’s adventures delivered her into the company of a rag-tag group of “unfit” whites — those whom NE refused to harbor due to any number of reasons, but chief among them: former Antifa membership, the past taking of non-white lovers/spouses, and ex-partisanship in the US government during its genocidal war against NE and its citizens. Having seen the error of their ways (and having become themselves targeted by the colored races), these “damaged goods” agreed to shepherd Charity and her son to the Great Lakes, whence mother and child could leave the country bound for Europe; in return, they asked Charity to vouch for them in their quest to gain admittance into NE. Reluctantly, she agreed. Even if they decide to consider your asylum, NE authorities will require you to name your great-grandparents — to know who they were, she warned. Bloodlines, “seed,” ancestors, and the passing down of ancient memory were everything to this newest of ethnostates.

“Joan of Arc Is Going To Help Lead Us Into New Europa!”

By the novel’s end, Charity had indeed sacrificed everything to pay that debt to her ancestors, to maintain her bloodline, to whom, as her mother once hissed in her ear, she owed all. In one of Quinn’s interesting twists, his modern American Joan of Arc accepted her fate by pledging her life and devotion to her race, rather than to her God. When one of her comrades, to whom she had grown especially close, entreated her to embrace “[her] Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” at the hour of their greatest need, she declined. No, she replied, for “I’m already saved . . . I’m a white woman. I’m fighting for my race. I belong with these people.” [14] Even as “she saw the world in flames, lit artificially by the terrible wreckage of war,” even as “All [seemed] lost and upside down — purged irretrievably into rising curtains of smoke and ash,” even as “The heat depleted her . . . she persevered, never losing sight in her mind of the fallen cross and the fallen flag.” [15] Quinn drew a moving and beautiful comparison here to the French saint, whose defiance both crowned a king and doomed her to the “smoke and ash” of the scaffold. Most readers will know that Jeanne d’Arc was both a martyr revered across Christendom as well as a symbol of specifically French nationalism. Her deep faith in God and the visions He sent her were guides that she refused to deny. But her sacrifice was for her countrymen — her people. The “heresy” for which her enemies burned her at the stake was not for her insistence on visions, but for “dressing as a man,” and donning the armor of a warrior committed to French victory. She died not for God, but for France.

“Smoke and ash” in Kay Nielsen’s La Mort (1914) from her Joan of Arc Series.

I will not spoil Quinn’s compelling novel by revealing whether or not Charity returned in triumph and on the wave of adoring crowds to New Europa; whether she managed to save her son and find him his Polish cure; whether the struggles of her soldiers-in-arms earned them redemption and a place in story and song; whether her “hope create[d] the very thing it contemplate[d].” [13] I will say only this: Quinn has written a narrative, germane to our times and with more than a few passages startling in their beauty and wisdom. It should be read by both men and women who remain faithful to our people, and who wish to instill within their children the same faith and “sense of awe one feels in the presence of matchless beauty” — the white race when it has existed and fought and loved in its finest hours. Such faith is “like being in the presence of God — it [is] impossible not to be mesmerized by something so clearly divine and graceful.” Of all the races that have peopled the earth, “Only [we] are like this . . .” [16] Only we can save ourselves from “the [coming] night [when] . . . the last warrior of [our] race” joins “the sons [and daughters] of Unamis” in oblivion. [17]

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Notes

Each of the bolded subtitles are quotes taken from Charity’s Blade.

[1] As quoted from Spencer Quinn’s “Trump Should Wargame Secession, Too,” in Counter-Currents (August 10, 2020).

[2] Ibid.

[3] I refer here to Ozymandias, Alan Moore’s villain in his 1986 graphic novel Watchmen. In order to “save” his people from an extinction-level nuclear holocaust, Ozymandias unleashed a monster of his own creation onto New York City. In his plot, mass death might finally halt a crime-ridden America hell-bent on Cold War immolation.

[4] Apart from the destruction of nightmarish groups like the Aztec and Comanche peoples, there was a tragedy to the Indian story. I do not condemn whites — my own ancestors — for ending the indigenous age in North America; neither do I celebrate it with graceless relish. It was simply a matter of us versus them.

[5] Spencer Quinn, Charity’s Blade (Helsingborg, Sweden: Logik Förlag, 2020), 22.

[6] The phrase “all against all” is one I have borrowed from “Modern Heretic” and his satirical blog.

[7] In Charity’s Blade, “scim” referred to a futuristic, “Army-issued, implant-controlled scimitar — called a scim — which coiled around [the] wrist like a bracelet,” and was battery-operated. It was the titular “blade” Charity most often used to defend herself and her people.

[8] Charity’s Blade, 146.

[9] Ibid., 93-95.

[10] Ibid., 340.

[11] Ibid., 213.

[12] Ibid., 68.

[13] Ibid., 148.

[14] Ibid., 540.

[15] Ibid., 553.

[16] Ibid., 517.

[17] James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (New York: Bantam, 1982), 425.