The Fiction of Harold Covington,
Part Three

2,674 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

Harold had planned to quit after A Mighty Fortress, but there was another story to be told, and a few months later, in late 2005, I found a manuscript in my mail. I opened it, smelling the heavy aroma of tobacco and old paper as I set my eyes upon a draft of The Brigade, Harold’s fourth Northwest novel. I agreed to be one of the proofreaders, and got to work.

At 335,000 words, it is much longer than A Mighty Fortress, and I was impressed with Harold’s draft. It was remarkably well-written and ordered, with little need for corrections or extensive editing. Regardless of his lack of formal education, and whatever his failings in the White Nationalist movement were, Harold was a precise and thorough craftsman.

The Brigade enlarged upon the Northwest saga in depicting a communal sense of the new Republic as it is growing and expanding after the Longview ceasefire and coalescing into a genuine homeland. There is more gunplay and fireworks,  of course, especially when depicting a murderous visit to the Academy Awards ceremony, and when a seaborne invasion of the Northwest is thwarted by improvised defenses and breathtaking counter-intelligence.

A new family featured is that of Zack Hatfield, a Northwest Volunteer. Julia, his sister, lives in Hollywood and works in the film industry — until the NWV attack there puts her in jeopardy. She then returns to Oregon to meet up with Zack in their hometown. The meeting is tense, but Zack is calm. When she asks him why he joined the NWV, he simply replies: Because it is right. Zack reiterates a Covington refrain that appears in this series and elsewhere: People have simply had enough.

Julia is uneasy. She’s been tortured by the FBI and lost all of her Hollywood privileges, But Zack is firm:

“We are making them stop what they are doing,” Zack says. “How many Mexicans did you see on your drive up here to the house?”

“None,” admitted Julia.

“We did that, Julia,” said Hatfield with grim satisfaction. “Congress didn’t do it. Elections didn’t do it. Democracy didn’t do it. Signing petitions and marching in the streets and babbling on the internet didn’t do it. We did it, with bullets, not ballots. And everyone in this town is better off for it.”

There is the usual swirl of Covington fighters, victims, and nation-builders, portrayed with common backgrounds and goals. The conversation is never strained. The Brigade is made up of real people. Harold also goes into great detail about how to make an uprising work. He shows you what you can do when you act.

It should be a long and tedious book, but The Brigade is a quick, engrossing read. Besides the Hatfields there is also Kicky McGee, a drug user, hooker, and snitch who joins the NWV, partly as an undercover agent so she can prevent her daughter from being taken away because of her drug use.

Kicky is a haunted, believable woman, another of Covington’s women who is in need of rescue — although Kicky rescues herself as much as the NWV does. She reads the NWV’s general orders, which copy the almost puritanical devotion Harold demanded of White Nationalists. They recall Winston Smith in1984 reading Goldstein’s book :

“Race is the North American issue . . . racial purity strengthens a society; whereas diversity weakens and eventually destroys it.”

“Who will compose that New World Order? An Anglo-Zionist ruling class, extensively Jewish and discreetly homosexual, consisting of an economic hierarchy of wealth and conformity that replaces the natural hierarchy of talent, courage, and virtue.”

Kicky is stunned.

For the first time in her adult life, someone was trying to reach her, to teach her something they thought she needed to know for her own good instead of something that would serve the interest of the rich people and empowered minorities.

Kicky’s development as a member of the NWV while agonizing over her mission to betray them is a powerful undercurrent of the volunteers’ struggles, and in the end she must come to terms with Harold’s observation that the white man can face danger, but he can’t face loneliness. The Brigade is a work of communal rebellion involving a huge cast submitting their doubts, anger, and longing to the words Ex Gladio Libertas: Freedom comes from the sword.

* * *

Yet, there was one more book. Harold was annoyed at people who said there could never be a white homeland because “it would get nuked.”

In his introduction to Freedom’s Sons, the final novel of the Northwest series, Harold said it took him two years to write it, starting on Thanksgiving Day in 2010 and ending on the same holiday in 2012. He also believed that November 6, 2012 — the date of Barack Obama’s reelection — marked the end of the United States “as we today understand the concept.”

Such orphic-sounding words seem to have a ring of truth as we consider the last few years and America’s current instability. Freedom’s Sons is a doorstop of a book at 912 pages — 177 more than The Brigade, but hardly boring. It’s a riveting chronicle of the Northwest Republic’s first decades, and is a veritable Ring Cycle of White Nationalist hopes — although unlike Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the Northwest renews itself via a new generation — but minus a cosmic catastrophe.

You can buy Fenek Solère’s novel The Partisan here.

It begins where A Mighty Fortress left off, during the battle for Portland as the NWV is storming a city of theirs that is being held by a semi-renegade force of Marines and FATPOs. Many characters return as they participate in the assault. Cody and Nightshade are both at the front line. Shane Ryan, now a Captain, also joins in the attack, as does Zack Hatfield.

In a by-the-numbers example of how to take a hostile city, Harold describes the action that he believed was being demanded by his readers. Then, the book describes the new government as it begins to build a new white ethnic state and head off another war with the United States. A human element is introduced in Montana, where Clancy Myers, a Professor, must deal with the new government’s control over the educational system. The reinstitution of Western values and the elimination of Marxist-progressive policies are secretly welcomed by Clancy, but his wife Amber, a determined Leftist, abhors the changes and flees to America, taking their daughter Georgia with her.

Meanwhile, a steady stream of Americans is coming west to  the Republic escape American multiculturalism and its increasing oppression and instability (gas is now $21 a gallon), among them the Horakova family from Chicago. Eddie Horakova killed a black man who was trying to rape his sister, and he and his family escape the inevitable official retribution by crossing the now militarized Montana border.

The book now gets into high politics. The Northwest Republic hears the new American President, Hunter Wallace, pledge to reintegrate their territory into the US. Wallace is a thoroughly corrupt, debauched, and increasingly irrational leader who is completely under the control of the circle of Jews who rule the country. As Randall, a Northwest agent, describes him: “Wallace is a wretch, but he’s no fool. He made a conscious decision at an early age that the Jews had the capacity to dispense to him the wealth and the power he craved, and he would do what he had to do for them in order to get it.”

Wallace’s new One Nation Indivisible program means that the Northwest forces now have to gear up for an invasion. Randall explains the motives of Wallace and those behind him:

The current president had a unique perspective on America . . . Hunter Wallace realized that a lot of the so-called social issues under the old order had to do not so much with people wanting to do things that were forbidden, but with forcing other people whom they didn’t like to do things they didn’t believe in or want to do. If you can give Americans that triumphalist feeling they’re controlling the way other people live, they will adore you for it.

The Northwest forces repel the American attacks as vaunted American air power and armored forces are pounded by their new weapons and tactics. As a nuclear strike is looming, Northwest intelligence needs someone to get to Wallace, and that is Georgia, now grown up and debased, living among the Washington, DC ruling class. She agrees to stop Wallace. The novel then becomes a political thriller as the Northwest Republic is saved, although at great personal loss.

With the destruction of the American military and a permanently disrupted economy, the US is now only capable of keeping a tenuous hold on the decaying cities inhabited by millions of third-worlders who are threatening to break out and ravage the still mostly white and stable countryside. These are cities that are “like huge nature preserves, fenced off and patrolled by American military contractors in order to keep the savages on the reservation, although of course in a nation that still adamantly refused to admit that race exists, this was never explicitly stated.”

The novel then jumps to a few years later, in a scene where the Solutrean theory of early American migration is depicted within a tight murder mystery wrapped inside new archaeological discoveries.

The rest of the novel takes us up to 40 years after the Longview treaty, focusing on two families on either side of the Montana border. Harold creates a Romeo-and-Juliet story involving Danny Tolivar and John Selkirk, young lovers whose family heads fought on either side of the war. Both men are shown in a mature and down-to-earth setting that gets complicated when the American government — which has been forced to abandon the now-chaotic Washington, DC for Burlington, Vermont — offers a dubious plan for economic development involving the Northwest.

There was a lot of grumbling among readers over Covington’s choice of the name Hunter Wallace for the depraved President, as it is the nom de plume of Bradley Dean Griffin, the head of the website Occidental Dissent, but I think there is an explanation for it aside from pure malevolence. It is simply a good name. Harold had occasion to borrow from other sources. An example is the names of Georgia and Clancy. The TV series Dead Like Me, which aired from 2003 to 2004, portrayed an academic father and his daughter who had similar names, and they also had to deal with a contentious mother. Since the series was set in Seattle, and filmed in Vancouver, I think the similarity is too obvious to be dismissed.

I’m impressed by the generational tone of this novel, showing time healing some wounds, the building of a new white homeland into a strong nation, and the final call for white people to unite, build, and develop a spiritual purpose through their race. But this battle cry never loses the human element, showing people dealing with the world before them. Ray Selkirk, speaking to Danny about the Northwest Republic, gently tells her the Northwest credo:

I’m sorry, ma’am, but this idea that violence never settles anything is simply not true. It has settled the fate of people and nations quite effectively and finally, ever since history began.

This is said not in hate, but in wistful determination. It reminds us of Harold’s oft-repeated saying it is time to bring the gun back into political arguments. The end of Freedom’s Sons offers an organic, hopeful rise of white peoples. For all the violence, argument, passion, and warfare depicted in the Northwest novels, there is at their center a plea for racial unity and normality: a return to humanity. It is a series of novels that leaves me feeling pacified and strong.

Harold was a passionate man, and he certainly created problems with people, thus leaving a mixed legacy in the White Nationalist community. Harold, like many writers, created a world on paper that is better than the flesh-and-blood one he lived in. Ten years on, the series still offers a coherent and stirring example of how to save the white race. And they are entertaining as well.

* * *

The 2013 publication of Freedom’s Sons completed the Northwest series, and Harold admitted that he was played out, both in writing and in terms of organizing the Northwest Front (NWF). It was obvious he was in declining health, but he kept slogging away at the NWF regardless, which was his last creation and, sadly, failed to ignite the revolution he had hoped to create.

But his life did not exactly end in failure. Harold wrote The Weird Aryan History Series, which were essays on world history and odd bits involving the white race that were always informative and entertaining. Harold returned to fiction in 2015 in Give Me the Night, his last work. Subtitled An Evil Love Story, it deals with a vampire on the loose in Seattle, hearkening back to his earlier fiction — but with a new twist. He wrote it under the name Martin Scanlan. He insisted that I not reveal that he was the author, as he hoped it would sell well to a wider audience. And I kept my word, only revealing this truth here for the first time.

Radovan Skoda is a vampire — an elegant, dispassionate being who feeds on the living, but who lives by a dignified code under which he culls the herd of weaker humans while preserving vampire lore and mores, including the mythical poem that explains their origins in in pre-history.

Skoda was originally a Czech mercenary who fought the Thirty Years’ War, and was taken by a vampire as he lay dying on a battlefield. His view of life in terms of centuries and the realities of the night world brings Harold’s cosmology into a final focus. As many previous Covington protagonists, Skoda redeems a lost woman, in this case Becky Carmody, a drug addict and hooker similar to Kicky in The Brigade. Becky, as Skoda’s assistant, becomes drawn to the vampiric ways. Skoda hopes she will join him as a vampire. He previously had a partner in Evadare, a woman who had been killed by Yankees in South Carolina in 1865. Skoda avenged her and then took her into the vampire world when she uttered the initiatory phrase “Give me the night.”

I have wondered where Covington’s continual depictions of the redemption of dead women comes from. Perhaps the death of Harold’s first wife left a deep impression, as did his disastrous second marriage and subsequent estrangement from his children. Harold writes of families and couples seeking love and fulfillment, even after death. Again, he depicted success on the page that eluded him in terms of flesh and blood.

Complicating Becky’s decision is the fact that the FBI is searching for both of them. Skoda reveals to her that modern technology is a new bane of the vampires, describing the feds as soulless. When Becky is captured and undergoes interrogation — torture — by the feds, Skoda deals with them in a roaring shoot-out worthy of Harold’s earlier works.

This story, which mixes elements of Harold’s earlier supernatural tales with a serene view of eternity and the alternate lifestyle of a creature of the night, is the coda to Harold Covington’s literary works. As he describes the life of a vampire and its unity with nature:

I look down and see the insects on the trees and the cracks in the sidewalk. I look up and I can see the craters and plains of the moon. I can hear it all, every sound for miles, and yet it’s not just noise. It all makes sense. I know what is going on all around me, like I never did before. . . . I am alive as I never was since I was born.

This is no better epitaph to Harold Covington’s life and works. Harold was a man who made his own choices. For all the good or bad he brought to those who worked alongside him in the cause of White Nationalism, he nevertheless sought a cosmic unity to define his struggle. His final task — like that of Radovan Skoda — was to embrace the night.

* * *

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