The Fiction of Harold Covington,
Part Two

Harold Covington with the flag of his proposed Northwest American Republic.

2,570 words

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

Harold Covington’s life and work centered on a determination some might call fanaticism. He clearly defined what his life was about:

There were as well several low ebbs in the past thirty-three years, when I could have slid off the stage into obscurity and into some shitjob, and the world would have forgotten about me. By choice, I never availed myself of those chances to get out of the life, and I have no reason to wail that “I never got a break.” I declined to take the breaks offered because to do so entailed making my peace with a world that is putrid, poisonous, and evil to its very wellsprings. One does not make peace with a loathsome disease. One does not come to accept evil as “Just one of those things.” One does not agree to the extinction of all that has made the world beautiful and good because it’s too inconvenient to do something about it.

Such an uncompromising statement would suggest a humorless fanatic, but this was not the Harold Covington I communicated with. We were never close, but I kept in touch. A key to Harold’s stand was how he had been moved by an injustice against whites so harsh he couldn’t stand by and do nothing. As I previously described, an undefined incident at school put him on the path to White Nationalism, but a more concrete incident gave rise to the Northwest novels, his most enduring creation.

Richard Girnt Butler created Aryan Nations, a White Nationalist group that eventually established itself in Idaho as a refuge for whites. The group put forward the Butler Plan, which called for a large, whites-only territory in North America, One of Pastor Butler’s credos was copied by David Lane of the The Order, becoming what is known as the Fourteen Words: We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. Pastor Butler’s compound was a popular gathering place, and the Aryan World Conference was held there. Butler was accused of, among others things, planning to start a race war, but none of the charges against him ever stuck. In 2000, however, a local Indian claimed that Aryan Nations security attacked him, and Morris Dees of the infamous Southern Poverty Law Center entered a massive lawsuit on his behalf that he ultimately won. Butler was required to pay $6.3 million in damages, effectively bankrupting Aryan Nations. Butler was forced to sell his large compound, and died in 2004. Dees continued his career of harassing White Nationalist groups until he was fired by the organization he had founded in 2019 following a number of charges of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Harold was angered by what happened to Aryan Nations, and swore to do something about what he called the vicious assault on Pastor Butler. In September 2003 he published The Hill of the Ravens (THOR). THOR is a White Nationalist novel in the form of a murder mystery. It is set in a future where the Pacific Northwest — Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Montana — have coalesced into a vibrant, whites-only nation called the Northwest American Republic. Colonel Donald Redmond, another of the fictitious family that features in many of Covington’s novels, is heading an investigation by the Republic’s BOSS (Bureau of State Security) into an incident involving a defeat in the Northwest’s long-ago war for independence from the United States in order to clear a woman’s reputation.

The novel is a story of betrayal in which the building blocks of what brought the Northwest Republic together are shown, as are several vignettes from everyday life in its society, from schools teaching white history (i.e., normal education devoid of multicultural indoctrination), to small-time merchants recalling their part in the war, to family relations in a world free of anti-white and corporate dictatorship. It is also the novel in which Covington began his love affair with the Northwest, and descriptions of the landscape abound.

Despite Covington’s initial rage, THOR is a calm story that solves its mystery chapter by chapter. There is never any intrusion of dogma . It is certainly White Nationalist fiction, but it also has a good story and imagery, and a wide range of characters, from Redmond to the Old Man — the revolution’s leader, who is Covington’s satirical self-portrait.

The Old Man lives in retirement, happily wisecracking on his estate on Bainbridge Island as he rails against the ducks on the lake, who are all named after failed White Nationalist leaders:

They’re big, soft white things who just waddle around and do nothing. When they open their mouths, nothing but blat comes out . . . You see, for fifty years, those were our leaders in the so-called Movement . . . that one with the dark, greasy feathers, that is Matt Koehl. The sleek looking drake out there is David Duke. . . . The sneaky-looking bastard with the black spot on his bill is Pierce. . . . I know their names. Before I die, I am going to kill every one of them.

“I’m sorry to see that you really are insane, sir,” said Redmond sadly, shaking his head.

‘Always was, son, always was,” chuckled the Old Man., leaning back on the bench and sending a cloud of ringed cigar smoke rising into the cool autumn air. “Nutty as a fruitcake all my life. Sane men didn’t revolt against ZOG. And sane men damned sure didn’t win!”

It’s easy to see why Harold was regarded with loathing by the “movement,” but this is a splendid example of Harold’s wit and skill at character description. One of White Nationalism’s failings is that it never developed a sense of humor. But in Covington’s case, despite all the grimness and heroic struggle depicted in his Northwest novels, Harold always had room for a laugh.

Harold also infuses his books with hope. Depicting a generational, cosmic struggle, he involves folk of all ages and gives us redemption and spiritual strength — or moral rearmament, as we called it in the sixties.

THOR ends as Redmond closes his investigation as they honor the dead warriors who created the Northwest Republic. He recalls the apathy of pre-revolutionary days:

We said, when we should have done. We were what the Irish called whiskey priests. We knew what was right, we just didn’t do it. But then one day, for reasons no one has yet figured out, we decided to do instead of to say. Now the people who lie there, they want you to do, to live, and to be. In whatever strength or weakness or joy or sadness or triumph or failure or just plain life comes to be your lot.

You can buy Fenek Solère’s novel Rising here

Harold’s novels are both consoling and a rallying cry to the racial struggle. He always believed in both the Fourteen Words and final victory. But how did he write these novels?

He admitted that his years in Ireland were of enormous creative importance to him. He studied the Irish Republican Army and their campaign against Britain and learned how, in the end, they didn’t defeat Britain but rather brought them to the negotiating table. Harold believed the IRA’s structure had been vital to its success, and when he wrote the Northwest novels, the Northwest Volunteer Army (NVA) was partly modeled on the IRA.

In A Distant Thunder, his second Northwest novel, Harold gives us Shane Ryan, a working-class kid who gets involved in the NVA. The novel thus offers us a ground-level view of an NVA soldier. It recalls Earl Turner in William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, but Harold renders Shane as a much more well-rounded character, as well as his world, which includes the Wingfields, a Christian family that joins the rebellion. Though them we feel the blood, sweat,  close shaves, and moments of victory in the Northwest.

Harold differed from Pierce in creating a Dickensian world of characters, odors, strife, and one-liners. The Turner Diaries lacks this same earthiness, but its strength is in making the White Nationalist struggle a dream-like, primal eruption. Earl Turner’s first-person narrative captures a subliminal part of the white race that was just coming to the surface to assert itself against the corporate, imperial, and — for Pierce — Jewish dominance of the West in the twentieth century. There is a remote beauty in Pierce’s style that recalls the sterner passages of Ayn Rand’s novels.

Harold is much more down-to-earth, a burly man waving the blue, white, and green banner of the Northwest Republic. He remarked that THOR actually has a plot, unlike The Turner Diaries. As he put it:

There seemed to be very little interest overall in what kind of future we are trying to build for our people. . . . There was much more interest in and favorable response to my depiction of the revolutionary war period with all that lovely and precarious violence. Those scenes feed the resentful White male revenge fantasies which seem to make up the closest  thing we have to any ideology.

Nonetheless, any author who seeks to have any kind of success in getting his point across has to start by seizing and holding the reader’s interest. To put it bluntly, he must give his audience what they want. It was made clear to me that the Movement wanted less racial H. G. Wells-ish Shape of Things to Come and more blood, gore, explosions, and fantasy kill, kill, kill. Again, for all my bitching and moaning and kicking and screaming, I understand perfectly well that it is unreasonable of me to expect anything different from this audience.

In 2011, in the Canadian12 Heures webzine, Harold went on to explain what he was aiming for in his writing:

Most White Nationalist novels — and there are some very good ones, and it is a growing genre — follow a certain plot line, with many variations, of course. A lone white man raised under political correctness and surrounded by liberal and multicultural madness experiences a kind of racial epiphany, an awakening, and he then either joins or begins some form of active resistance. He either fails and perishes gloriously, or he succeeds through some kind of deus ex machina. You might say Pierce’s Turner Diaries incorporates both those denouements.

Harold’s Northwest novels exploit his Irish experience to show organized, organic resistance that at first operates in small cells, carrying out hit-and-run raids, bombings, and assassinations, and then grows in size and operational reach as the revolt grows. The initial spark of armed resistance takes place in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where government agents in the process of taking some children from their White Nationalist parents are suddenly attacked, triggering a mass armed revolt spreads. This event is never shown in any of his novels, but throughout the series Coeur d’Alene is always invoked as the Awakening where, as Harold describes it, people just had had enough. Folk ballads and songs about the revolution appear throughout the series, as are quotations from Shakespeare and other sources.

The rebellion is always begun, organized, and sustained by the working class throughout the novels. Shane Ryan is the prime example of this; a sense of working-class camaraderie is depicted through a changing cast of characters. Again, the Dickensian parallels are evident in the dialogue, situations, and patches of melodrama, all interspaced with remarkably solid action scenes that never lose the common, human touch.

There are of course political passages as well, although Harold avoids being preachy. These sections come naturally amidst the flow, and when his characters are speaking dogma, there is a blue-collar earthiness to it that is in contrast to the formal — and at times grandiose — passages in, say, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I never doubt that Covington’s characters work for a living.

The third book, A Mighty Fortress, was originally titled Freedom’s Sons, after the popular Irish ballad, but Harold worried about potential copyright problems. His new hero is Cody Brock, another teenage boy who joins the Volunteers. He meets Kelly Shipman, a doctor’s daughter who is slightly more affluent, and while it at first seems that she and Cody will get together, events change and Emily Pastras, a fellow volunteer who is handy with a knife, comes into Cody’s life. She is known to everyone in the NVA as Nightshade. They join up with Fagin’s gang of NWV forces to take on the system, especially the FATPOS, an anti-terrorist unit composed mostly of gang members and dark-skinned mercenaries, and usually led by patriotic white “Amurrican” officers.

The United States is caught in a long-running war in the Middle East. Its political system has become overtly dictatorial and beginning to show signs of strain under President Hilary Clinton. She has turned power over to Chelsea Clinton, and the war in the Northwest — a colonial war — has began to rupture the economy. As Harold often writes, colonial wars are never ended by the generals but by the accountants. Eventually a truce is called and negotiations begin — although FATPOS in Seattle revolts, and Cody, Nightshade, and their column liberate a shopping mall and waste a score of them.

Harold describes what follows as the Longview Conference, and a major purpose of the novel is to show how to negotiate a treaty and the problems involved in bringing factions of the NWV together, as well as defining what a white nation should look like. This may sound dull, but it is in fact an exciting, dramatic, and tense part of the book as the various factions argue over what to ask for. They maintain unity such that the National Socialists, Christians, Odinists, and the spiritually uncommitted are able to present a united front. Barrow, one of the NWV’s commanding officers, insists on spiritual unity , denouncing the anti-Christian elements as well as moderating those who want a Christian republic. As Barrow explains:

We will most likely come to a consensus among ourselves that while the Christian faith is a glorious and indelible part of our past, it is something we have outgrown, as a child outgrows his clothes, and it is time for us to move on.

A truce is agreed upon regarding religion, but the Fourteen Words are a credo never to be forgotten. The delegates then board their helicopter to go and meet the Americans.

Harold gets a chance to vent his spleen regarding what he considers to be the problems of the White Nationalist movement. Cody and Nightshade also offer lessons in diplomacy; Cody had been adopted into a Jewish family and knows Yiddish, so is able translate it. (Covington’s novels have copious amounts of Yiddish, Russian, Gaelic, and Afrikaans in the dialogue; it is colorful and never forced. It’s a wonder how Harold, not having gone to college, displays an erudition I rarely saw in many college graduates.) Cody then engages in a tense battle with Susan Horowitz, his step-sister; her elegance and hauteur recalls that of Naomi Mendoza in Covington’s Bonnie Blue Murder.

The book ends with the Northwest Republic achieving a tenuous acceptance by the United States and begins its life with its own national anthem. After a comic argument over whether the new flag should fly to the strains of “Ride of the Valkyries,” the Hohenfriedburg March, or the Horst Wessel Lied. It’s decided that Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress” will convey the spirit of the white nation.

Cody and Nightshade are engaged, and all ends in happiness —  except that the NWV army is preparing to assault and liberate Portland.

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