Meet the Hunburgers

You can buy Nikolay Pavlov’s novel The White Huns of Identaria here.

4,002 words

Nikolay Pavlov
The White Huns of Identaria
Self-published, 2023

The air was heavy with a unique admixture of common nationalism, alcohol fumes and the smell of men’s sweat.

If Bronze Age Pervert wrote a novel along the lines of The Iron Dream,[1] I think it would read something like The White Huns of Identaria.[2]

Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, Nikolay Pavlov — who shares his name with a number of distinguished figures, both literary and political — earned a Ph.D. in the management of security and defense research, and worked for the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences’ Center for National Security and Defense Research. In addition to his scholarly work, he was a founder of the Bulgarian Human Rights Association, the first such organization to fight against anti-Bulgarian racism and discrimination in Bulgaria.

This is his first published novel, and being a political animal, it’s not surprising that it is a political novel. It tells the story of a nationalist uprising in Identaria, which seems like an Eastern European backwater, although many German words are sprinkled throughout (helpfully translated in the endnotes); indeed, well before the Putsch midway that confirms it, the reader will have the suspicion that although the novel takes place in the near future, it hews fairly closely to well-known events in Germany between the two events that Francis Parker Yockey liked to call the European Civil Wars.

Of course, discerning this underlying pattern does rather remove much of the narrative suspense, but like The Iron Dream this is not intended to be merely an amusing “alternative history” but to illustrate, through fiction, lessons that can be applied to contemporary nationalist struggles.[3] In this sense it might be compared to the novels of Colin Wilson, which used fiction to explore the implications of various existential and social theories,[4] although there is a closer resemblance to The Divine and the Decay (aka The Leap), the more explicitly political novel of Wilson’s colleague Bill Hopkins.[5]

Lest this seem unduly serious, the author has leavened his work with sly allusions to the contemporary dissident scene, including references to such characters as the revered Gen. Andrew Anglim (very sic), “chief spider of the world white web, who alone has the legitimate power and means to declare the worldwide white revolution,” and Lennart Cohen, described as:

An Identarian flower child of a sort, an easy rider looking for freedom and adventure, and whatever came around. He strongly wished to be on the road and didn’t want to be scripted.

Cinematic shadows also extend to include our protagonist, Quentin, whose “broad forehead and big jutting chin” allow him to grab the attention of stoner crowds for his nationalist rants through his resemblance to “the world-famous scriptwriter and film director,” like a Hitler-Riefenstahl charisma combo: “Quentin almost felt like a true scriptwriter.”

Indeed, “the underground club of National Resistance” is a sort of mashup of the Braunes Haus, Fight Club, and Pulp Fiction, complete with its own leather-masked gimp as well as a shelf containing “the seminal works of Professor Greg Johnson.”[6] The club is in “central New Laibach,” and like many locales throughout the book, features such tunes as “Megathrone’s ‘Race of Spades.’”

You either like this kind of thing, or you don’t; I myself can’t get enough of it. If it seems inappropriate for a “serious” book about our dire political situation, take it up with Hermann Hesse or Thomas Mann, both of whom delighted in such “onomastic comedy.”[7] One might wish to see Milo here as well; although it’s hard to say how he would fit into this masculinist milieu, I’m sure he would enjoy trying.

A more somber passage, satirizing Conservative Inc. or the Grifter Right, deserves quoting at some length, as it is a good example of what might be called Pavlov’s “Bronze Age Fantasy” or “BAP Gothic” style. The grey eminence of the nationalists, perhaps a kind of Dugin or Evola, speaks:

“Then, all of a sudden, the huckster nationalists came over and started trading in nationalism at the market place. Their name was ‘golden patriots’ or, otherwise, ‘merchants in the temple of nationalism’. So, the golden patriots came over in their classy cars, rushed into the crypt under the Clock tower and stared at the Green Hero[8] as he was standing in the dark, his chains rattling together, greenish light emanating from his body. He had a pagan look and would not speak with the golden patriots. Patriot no.1, who had the largest belly, could not keep calm and thus cried out, “Charge, my kosher nationalists! Let’s hug the Green Hero tightly as we admire him!” Patriot no.1 did just so, sinking his teeth into the resurrected flesh. Tasty it appeared to him so he bit larger pieces. Obviously, Patriot no.1 was fond of having extraordinary steaks for dinner! [The others join in.] Thus, the golden patriots devoured all the Green Hero’s flesh and only the bones were left after the feast. Afterwards, they stared at this eerie holy skeleton, stuffed. Then, Patriot no.2 suggested, “Let us sell the skeleton and let our consciences be clean.” And so, the golden patriots did this at once. They arranged a call for tenders for the holy skeleton and the highest bidder was Khazaria Inc., a fishy corporation claiming to be a nation. The nation-corporation was specialized in self-promotion through national identity scams and held a patent on the oldest racism. . . . So, they sold the skeleton of the Green Hero to Khazaria Inc. at the price of thirty-one pieces of gold. They divided the plunder and left one piece of gold in the crypt to shine in the darkness for the golden patriots of the future. The consultants from Khazaria Inc. took the holy bones into their secret laboratories for processing and reengineering. We are not aware of exactly what they did, but my magical toolkit showed me that the Nationslayer[9] has the same bones – the bones of the Green Hero. That’s the reason why the struggle against the Nationslayer is so terribly hard.”

But Pavlov is not, such as another of his namesakes, simply providing stimuli to prompt your amusement; he has important information to relay. First of all, free yourself from the chains of ideology:

There are those calling for ideological clean-ups and wash-ups. They would say: “One should drink a pint of vodka but should not smoke a joint.” And this is considered ideological purity. Nothing could be further from purity. Take off your ideological underwear and we shall see all the dirty spots upon it to remind us that ideologies are only clean in the mornings and become dirty in the evenings. Every ideology is a social construct. They are like drinks — they can very easily mix together. Opposing ideologies are practically inseparable and dialectically impossible without the other one. So, Jolly Reader, beware when you hear the cries of ideological clean-freaks and think about them only as a great pretence. There is nothing more slippery and sticky in this world than ideologies. They are highly transmissible diseases that feed on human weaknesses. Every ideology is ultimately about control over the masses. Weak are all the ideological clean-freaks as they will eventually bend the knee to pleasure.[10]

And among other things, ideology prevents you from recruiting the very people you need: hard men, most likely hard drinkers and hard partiers as well: “This dark side, which might be fearsome for some, becomes indispensable for any national revolution.” Indeed, the book is floating in a flood of alcohol (which the Nationslayer has banned) and a haze of “joint.”

And all those that preach hate against pleasure are, in fact, con artists. Pleasure and hate have the right to exist as they are all too human. And every decent person should be seeking to enhance equality in pleasure. Indeed, pleasure kills but it is also a great leveller. All nations are equal before alcohol as it is a holy gift for all, no matter whether you are Identarian or Raceless.[11] Alcohol can unite nations just like the will of a Führer. The reign of alcohol will last a thousand years; the Führer of alcohol is immortal as all nations bow down to him. If you want to beat the Führer of alcohol, you will need to turn yourself into a Führer of pleasure, and work up new gratifications for the people.

Quentin had developed a cunning strategy for recruiting warriors, and for sparking revolutionary sentiments through joint and alcohol. These were the pretty faces of pleasure known to the lads and lasses of Hunburg. Quentin was well aware that most of the people were weak and lazy or simply passive; many did not have the nationalist gene at all. Reading up on some history, Quentin got to know that the so-called revolutionary terror had often been instrumental in such cases. But the undergraduate student was creative enough to craft a new strategy: “radicalization through pleasure”. He delivered joint from New Laibach and, later on, alcohol from the secret stores of his family house, but that was not for profit. By delivering these basic pleasures Quentin managed unnoticeably to recruit a number of young and wild Hunburg men who joined the ranks of The Warriors of Identhor. He was acting on his own as a dealer without putting the Organization at risk but the gains were for the Organization as a whole. This strategy, indeed, had not been discussed with the Warlock who would probably consider the recruitment methods unacceptable. Quentin, however, was sure that this was the only way to expand the network of the Organization and to provide a constant inflow of new followers. He was vehemently flying the flag of pleasure to ignite the new Identarian national revolution.

You can buy North American New Right vol. 2 here

In fact, the Warlock is all for the tactic:

“Get on with recruiting new people as you have the talent for that. And, besides, you have booze which is extremely precious in these dry times and will give us many followers. It is booze that will stick The Warriors of Identhor together. Some of the new warriors will be simply boozers but a few will be radicals and will do the job diligently.” ^[12]

These men will be the “cultured thugs” that Jonathan Bowden[13] prophesized:

As a result of his upbringing, Quentin was unable to partake in criminal activity but had inexplicable sympathy towards these thugs. They were a kind that he could not actually be. “How could you have a national revolution without men skilled in the art of violence?” Quentin thought every day and night. Looking at the rough features of the Suvars he realized that, in spite of all their shortcomings, these outlaws were true Identarians, nationalists and men of direct action.^[14]

Perhaps there is some method to the madness:

“To tell you the truth I am hesitant about this man,” the Warlock said coldly as he was not entirely trustful of the young guns. “Küssel is simultaneously a punk, drunkard, druggie and criminal — his conduct is beyond the pale. By all accounts, he is a violent thug who often picks fights. Once in a while he performs nationalist acts but it is more like playing a part, being edgy on the nationalist scene and atoning for his crimes. We, The Warriors of Identhor, need true nationalists for our cause!”

Quentin sipped some cold fire-milk,[15] contemplating. “Rather, he is available and willing to try his luck in the operation. It is no easy work to find operatives for such a dangerous venture. Men with more sense are taking no risks. Many would say that we have gone mad to fight the Raceless and the Nationslayer. I agree that Küssel is no edelweiss but we don’t have a better one at hand, and we would hardly find one in our beloved Hunburg either. I guess I get along with him and will have him in the palm of my hand.

There’s also practical advice for conspirators:

The mind of the provincial conspirator is buzzing as he spreads the cobweb of the provincial revolution. Just like a doomed spider he becomes entangled and strangled by his own web. Most of the people in provincial towns and rural areas tend to be relatives of a sort which creates conflicts of interest in the straightforward revolutionary process. You must have thorough knowledge of all the little feuds and factions that have evolved over time in the small town. People know each other painfully well — which is terrible as you cannot even get drunk unnoticed. This is transparency without borders, a total provincial nakedness before the public eye. The spider of the provincial revolution is turning on its back, revealingly, and this spider is no other than you. No secrets left and all public eyes are staring at you, my poor conspirator. You are pierced, enshrouded and strangled by human stares in the small town. Starting a conspiracy, you will become so entangled in a web of relatives and friends that you will get nowhere. You will step on family land mines, fall in pits of deeply stored hatred, and finally will be stormed by the cold waves of petty-minded existence. And when you get to the meaning of the revolution, you find out that even your noble nationalism has rustic roots and that is the reason for it appearing a bit like a lopsided shed. The national revolution that you have been longing for is actually lurking around the corner for you. Beware, you nationalist spider! Your revolution is sharpening its teeth for you, in the small provincial town.

Nevertheless, in an ex-nation where the very word “nation” has been banned, it is only in the ethnic enclaves found in small provincial towns such as Hunburg, original home and last bastion of the titular Huns, where the nationalist revolution has the best chance of starting, as the Warlock muses:

“Fortunately, this is still the only town in Identaria where information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the information environment as a whole are still very outdated and harmless for our townsfolk. We must be thankful to Identhor and our efforts for this healthy state of affairs. It is only thanks to this technological backwardness that we are still free Identarian nationalists. The power of Hunburg and The Warriors of Identhor rests on information defence. We are, thus, outside the scope of the Nationslayer’s army of info-ghosts who are storming and oppressing Identaria by dangerous information-psychological attacks. The info-ghosts are information remains from the social media accounts of dead people. The Nationslayer is using them to control the information environment of Identaria. But we are savage Identarians and free to drink from the stream of nationalism as this is true fire-milk for us. Down with the ICTs!”

All efforts to create National Resistance web pages and social media accounts were futile as these would be deleted by the tech tyrants almost immediately. And that was good. All National Resistance activists were free from the social media’s ill influence and moral decay. National activists had time to drink, to socialize, to fight and conspire.

You can buy James J. O’Meara’s Mysticism After Modernism here.

And in the same way, resistance must start in a small, backward country, as the Warlock says:

“White revolutions are simply not possible in those crypto-Aryan states which have denounced their Aryan legacy and are fully under the control of Grendel, the archenemy of the Race. The white revolution is only possible in the fruitful chaos of Identaria. Our hate is productive. The first white ethno-state will be built in Identaria and Hunburg will be the Holy Land of the New White. And then white revolutions will be spawned all over Uneurope under the Huns. Finally, Uneurope will become Huneurope in truth!”

Alcohol certainly fuels more interesting policies than those of the teetotalling Trump:

“We should erect a very special Wall on the border with the Oguz to halt the Raceless invaders who periodically storm our homeland from the Race Distilleries. On this state-of-the-art Wall, the invading Raceless would be fiercely shot dead by the Identarian special forces and would be walled up in the Wall to enhance its resilience. What could be a stronger psychological barrier than a Wall built out of the dead bodies of the invading Raceless? By ancient Identarian custom, the invaders must be walled up in it, dead or alive . . . We have forgotten about building the sacred walls of Identarian defence, and that is why we have been conquered and subjugated by the Raceless and this freak, the Nationslayer. The Wall will be the avatar of our nation’s will. Etymologically speaking, both words ‘wall’ and ‘will’ originate from the same root, as evidenced by their similarity.”

And it even provides the final solution, in the form of a special gas known by the innocuous name of “the blues”:

“As you can see, this is a most powerful battle gas. We have used the gas on an inhuman creature, having no conscience whatsoever. And even this creature has acquired bright consciousness — for a short period, indeed — while being gassed by the blues. You can see its consciousness reflected in its eyes, bright and shining in the ethno-plasma. Once it has consciousness, this creature has identity too. It becomes ethnical in a way. And it is no longer inhuman. No other product on earth can give you this effect! The mole gets ethnic identity through super-alcoholization.”[16]

Invitations are to be sent out to the leaders of the raceless, requesting them to attend a special event in their honor. Just as promoting the ethnostate evades the ban on the word “nation,” how could anyone object to stopping the hate?

“But they are Raceless. How can you incite racial hatred against people who have no race whatsoever?” Gromp fired back. “We will gas them in order not to hate them anymore!” he added as an afterthought. “Let’s put an end to hatred in this country at last.”[17]

Ultimately, as history shows, the putsch of alcoholic punks doesn’t really work out, Quentin and Küssel have a falling out, and a new strategy needs to be found. National awakening may need to take its origin in the violent lower orders, but after some initial success it cannot remain there; to consolidate its gains and complete its triumph, it must evolve into something else.

Wrapping it all up is a piratical ending that leaves a lot of room for future developments and owes more to Atlas Shrugged than Pavlov might like to admit.

What then, Jolly Reader? In line with his distaste for ideological purity, Pavlov leaves that up to you. The medium of fiction allows for ideas to play out in the “real” world and be observed in the round, as it were, rather than as rigid doctrines and slogans. The White Huns of Identaria is an enjoyable way to review where we are, and start thinking about where we need to go, and what path to take.

Come visit Hunburg, and plan to stay a while!

* * *

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Notes

[1] “The Iron Dream is a metafictional 1972 alternate history novel by American author Norman Spinrad. The book has a nested narrative that tells a story within a story. On the surface, the novel presents a post-apocalyptic adventure tale entitled Lord of the Swastika, written by an alternate-history Adolf Hitler shortly before his death in 1953. In this timeline, Hitler emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1919 after the Great War, and used his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp–science fiction illustrator and later a successful writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed, pro-fascism stories under a thin science fiction veneer. The nested narrative is followed by a faux scholarly analysis by a fictional literary critic Homer Whipple which is said to have been written in 1959. . . . Irony abounds in Whipple’s review, as he argues author Hitler is obviously wrong in assuming that not much more than midnight rallies and phallic symbolism would create a large number of supporters for a movement. ‘After all’ Dr. Whipple says, ‘it can’t happen here’.” (Wikipedia)

[2] I take this opportunity to deny Peter Bredon’s absurd claim that BAP is, in reality, myself.

[3] The jacket tells us that “[i]n his first novel he draws on traditional Gothic fantasy to develop the original fantasy world of Identaria and to experiment [with] radical Western [political] concepts.”

[4] See John Morgan, “A Heroic Vision for Our Time: The Life & Ideas of Colin Wilson” (as well as in a considerably revised and expanded version of this same essay that was included in North American New Right, vol. 2), and my own “Neville & the Rebel: Reflections on Colin Wilson & Neville Goddard,” reprinted in Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson, & Other Populist Gurus (Colac, Victoria, Australia: Manticore Press, 2020).

[5] See Margot Metroland, “The Prophet of Exhaustion: Being Yet Another Remembrance of Bill Hopkins (1927–2012), Part 2.”

[6] Perhaps an allusion to Trevor Lynch’s review of Pulp Fiction (reprinted in Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies; ed. by Greg Johnson and with an Introduction by Kevin MacDonald [San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012]), which argues that it is “a film about the most fundamental metaphysical and moral choices we can make — that just happens to be set in the midst of the criminal underclass of a decadent society”; as we’ll see, this could be a description of the novel as well.

[7] See Theodore Ziolkowski, Foreword to The Glass Bead Game (1969 Bantam edition).

[8] A spectral reincarnation of a legendary Identarian hero.

[9] The anti-nationalist dictator of Identaria.

[10] This reminds one of that great epistemological anarchist, Max Stirner; for more on Stirner, see the articles and reviews here. “Max Stirner” was the pseudonym of Johann Kaspar Schmidt, who was nicknamed “Stirner” as a schoolboy, due to his large forehead; could this connect him to Quentin as well?

[11] The Nationslayer, in keeping with this alcoholic vision, has not only banned the stuff, but is flooding Identaria with the Raceless, products of the sinister Race Distilleries, where “all ethnic and racial qualities are squeezed up, distilled and drained from the bodies and souls of the victims. Grendel feeds off the Race.”

[12] Perhaps too reminiscent of the “cunning plan” to use hipster losers to execute an armored car robbery in The Rebel Set, discussed here. As those in the days of those “rather mixed-up sons of pastors and civil servants, Hölderlin, Schelling, Hegel (and later Nietzsche),” Dionysus is to be hired in order to send nihilism packing, set up a new state, and then, hopefully, be sent packing as well. See Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (Harvard, 1989), 134.

[13] “Truthfully, in this age those with intellect have no courage and those with some modicum of physical courage have no intellect. If things are to alter during the next fifty years, then we must re-embrace Byron’s ideal: the cultured thug.” — Jonathan Bowden.

[14] “The Knights of Columbus were real head-breakers; true guineas. They took over their piece of the city. Twenty years after an Irishman couldn’t get a fucking job, we had the presidency. May he rest in peace. That’s what the niggers don’t realize. If I got one thing against the black chappies, it’s this: No one gives it to you. You have to take it.” –- Frank Costello, The Departed (Scorsese, 2006).

[15] The national drink of Identarians. NPR says in an article entitled “Mare’s Milk?”: “While the idea of sipping mare’s milk might sound unusual to Western readers, it’s been a traditional staple in Central Asia, where it is often fermented into ‘koumiss,’ a mildly alcoholic drink that was adopted by Russian doctors in the mid-19th century as a treatment for tuberculosis. Patients no less illustrious than the writers Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy swore by its curative powers. In Europe today, mare’s milk remains a niche product, but its reputation as a health elixir is causing trouble for producers in a more regulated age.”

[16] For more on “the blues,” see Nicholas Kollerstrom, Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust, Myth and Reality (Uckfield, UK: Castle Hill Publishers, 2014), reviewed here.

[17] I call this the Oscar Wilde Strategy: We must eliminate the poor, since the poor are so unattractive. See his 1891 essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism.”