What to read? (Part 2)

Literature: Harold Covington

Let us leave aside the political plausibility or post-historical veracity of Covington’s novels dealing with the war of White independence at the beginning of the 21st century in the Pacific Northwest. What needs to be singled out in Covington’s prose is his language, his ability to construct both real and surreal plots, and above all his skill to administer a good dose of empathy with his diverse characters.

And indeed there is a whole gallery of diverse characters in his novels — from disfranchised poor Whites from the South who were once victims of positive discrimination and who have now landed in the embattled Northwest, to ritzy and sold-out WASP politicians in DC, vying to be more Jewish than the Jews themselves. Each of his numerous characters is carefully situated in his own timeframe, each carrying his own clusters of conflicting memories, often haunting him for the rest of his life. Covington, as much as he dissects the mindset of his warring heroes does not just examine their self-proclaimed racial awareness, but focuses instead on their historical consciousness. The reader won’t find characters blaring “White power!” or sporting swastikas, or endlessly debating about the ominous Jews. The frequent monologues by his characters bear witness that their individual memories are seldom sweet. Even in a pristine environment of the Northwest Republic, residents are immersed in their own Shakespearean dilemmas of being vs. not being. In most cases the racial awareness of Covington’s characters is coupled with their reminiscences of the haunting times of bygone eras. Thus, in his latest novel Freedom’s Sons  depicting the nascent Northwest Republic, we come across a man who serves as one of the chiefs of the Northwest secret police. But this man has also a past; he is not just an empty White slate. His grandparents, back in the mid-20^th century had fled communist Czechoslovakia and settled in the city of Chicago – only to discover another form of paleo-communist aka liberal insanity. Their progeny, the future settlers in the Northwest, realized that in the land of the free and the home of the brave, they were not just subjects to the terror of affirmative action, but also victims of serial burglaries and rampant Black crime. Finally, after much procrastination they decided to move to the Northwest, encountering on their way both physical and psychological roadblocks which in many ways reflected the predicaments they had once encountered in communist Europe.

The strength of Covington’s prose lies in his ability to destroy human illusions and wishful thinking about the linear unfolding of time, which seems to be a standard pillar of liberal scholasticism. In this sense Covington’s novels are not just fictional stories dealing with Whites shooting guns, but also philosophical treatises announcing Slow Coming Dark scenes of unimaginable catastrophes awaiting all White people in modern America. Most of his characters, both the White “good guys” and the non-White “bad guys,” are tragic figures who despite the computerized environment they live in, are all well aware of their mutually exclusive racial determinism.

The style and the story can often tell a lot about the author himself. Covington is a master of the English language; he successfully interjects into his dialogues slang expressions used by Black or Hispanic characters, as for instance when he briefly depicts the hellhole of south Los Angeles, or nearby Compton. He also captures the finesse of the English language when describing the dialogue between educated Whites hiding in a safe house near Portland. Covington is just as much at ease in depicting the primeval impulses of a Cholo from California, or the impulsive behavior of a Black gangsta who schemes on how to get a free ride on the White man’s credulity. He also easily relates the postured legalese used by the ruling class in Washington DC, which although advocating in public the doctrine of racial diversity, prudently avoids in private the company of non-Whites, always dreading, however, the public chutzpah of all pervasive Jews.

Although Covington is well aware of the deep and fateful determinant of race, his White heroes realize that the notion of racial affiliation—or what can be called academically “in-group sentiments,” are far more pronounced among non-Whites than among Whites. So much had the process of self-hate been inculcated in the minds of latter-day Whites in a latter-day “Amurrica,” that in most cases many of his good- natured Whites take for granted their suicidal ritual of self- hate. Very telling is his description of a mestizo lady, a high-ranking federal cop, whose job in Portland consists in ratting out White separatists, yet who savors only the company of her White superiors and engages only in sexual encounters with her White federal bosses.

Those passages on racial introspections of different characters are far more instructive in the study of racial psychology than the complete works by racial psychologists of the likes of Julius Evola or Ludwig Clauss.

Metapolitics, Metempsychosis and Metaphysics

Just as a reader may be tempted to categorize Covington as a good writer of fiction dealing with an apocalyptic latter-day America, he can also be called a master of historical discourse, well in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott or Leo Tolstoy.  While it may be relatively easy for a writer to compose a novel set in the future tense, along with all accompanying high tech paraphernalia, such as we often find in any number of science fiction novel (and which can be also occasionally spotted in Covington’s war novels), it is far more difficult to draft a novel outline with a clear cut historical theme, let alone capture the language and the odor of the political climate of a bygone era. Covington’s skill in writing historical novels lies in his ability to project himself beyond the contemporary timeframe, well into an anticipated future and well beyond the time sequences of the past. This feature of his work has often been neglected by his critics.

Covington uses a three-pronged analysis in the study of his characters: metapolitics, metempsychosis and metaphysics.  His work is metapolitical in so far as his historical novels provide a good description of the power of theological deliriums occurring in the 15^th and 16^th century England and how those mass beliefs shaped the politics of that time. Indeed, if a reader wants to better grasp the psychopathology of the Marxist mystique and its 20^th-century armies of true believers in Western academia, Covington’s roman à clef, The Black Flame, can be helpful.

The action in this novel takes place in 15^th-century England, still involved in the Hundred Years War with the Kingdom of France.  All kinds of weird cults had sprung up all over England and Europe, each claiming that the Judgment Day is on their doorstep, each offering its theological salvation kit for spiritual survival. The main hero of the novel, an English detective of Irish ancestry, sent by the Royal House of England, investigates the sect known as the Black Flame, somewhere in a desolate part of East Anglia. The rumor had spread that the sect is involved in the practices of ritual killings and debauchery. When the story of this book is extrapolated into our own timeframe, it implicitly sends a warning message to modern day crazed and self-styled “Nutsies,” who often conceive of their Whiteness as an exercise in Satanic and criminal behavior, thereby scaring normal White people off and doing irreparable harm to their kinsmen. Therefore, before a student or a White activist begins reading academic works on racial psychology, such as the works by a well-known scholar of the psychology of the masses, Gustave le Bon, the novel The Black Flame can serve as a good introductory literature.

Covington’s approach is also metaphysical in so far as his best book, Other Voices Darker Rooms, containing a collection of historical novelettes, deals with the haunting subject of time and being and how the main characters attempt to exit the prison of the time flow they were born into.  Although the book may be at first glance an easy read, a better understanding requires that it be read twice, not least because it includes a great deal of shifting symbolism linked to differently reincarnated heroes, each acting within his own specific historical timeframe. Very few authors, both past and present, have done such a massive amount of research and travelling, as well as character analysis as Covington has. Covington captures in his historical novels not just the spirit of the time of a particular historical epoch, but also delves into detailed description of the characters’ attire, their language, and, above all, their historical memories. Unlike many scholars and White activists Covington realizes that Whiteness must have its name and its historical residence; his main heroes, or for that matter even his counter-heroes in the dying American system, are aware of their distant Southern White, Polish, Irish, German, Black, or Jewish roots. Seldom do his White heroes rant about abstract Whiteness. All of them show a deadly awareness of the powerful impact of their collective memory.

Actually one could catalogue Covington’s historical novels with the label “transhistorical,” given that his main characters constantly wish to trespass the wall of time. Therefore, one could roughly insert Covington’s work into in the same register with the works of Howard P. Lovecraft, Ernst Jünger, or Aldous Huxley, three authors who are often called “traditionalist,” “reactionary,” or “conservative.” All of them strive to arrest the flow of time, wishing to turn back the sands of time—at least for a fraction of a cosmic second.

Covington and the Wall of Time

Covington is at his best when he describes the psychology of Jewish shtetl dwellers in eastern Galicia, in what is today eastern Poland and Western Ukraine, after the dismal retreat of Napoleon’s armies from Russia in late 1812. The main heroes of his novelette Whisper her Name on the Wind are a Jewish young lady and the Cossack chief. The French armies having departed, there suddenly ride into the shtetl  the dreaded Cossack horsemen, a fearless warlike Slavic people who had served traditionally as the Praetorian guards to the Russian Tsars and who had a historic reputation for their extreme hatred of Jews. And the other way around, of course. In his novels, however, Covington, never engages in repetitious black and white insults of the Jews by the goyim, nor does he regurgitate words like “kikes,” “yids,”  “hebes,” “youtres,” “youpins,” “Saujuden,” “chifut,” “zhid,”,  “zhidov,” etc. —  words which, to be sure, are on the daily (albeit strictly private) menu of all White citizens in Europe and America. Instead, he looks at the grey shadings in between when depicting his good, bad and ugly characters. Here we encounter a courageous Jewish girl of noble character who wants to save her town from the Cossack pogrom, even after the Cossacks had already found out that the Jewish mayor had lied about the gold stolen from the Tsar’s treasury. For her honesty and bravery in cutting an amicable deal with the soon-to-be-departing Cossack troopers, the young Jewish lady was stoned to death by her tribesmen. One could almost say that this young Jewish lady killed by her tribe resembled the Biblical Esther – albeit in a reversed role. She had broken the gold covenant of her tribe.

The strength of the novelette lies in its accurate description of the attire and behavior of the wild Cossack warriors and their chief, a refined and a noble gentleman who, quite in line with the ancient Cossack family tradition, keeps his sacred word of honor. Yet when he finds out about the cowardly murder of the young Jewish lady by her own people, he orders his men to carry out the massacre of all the Jews in the town.

Covington has not had a chance to write a sequel to this novelette, a sequel which occurred well beyond a different wall of time. One hundred and thirty two years later, in the late spring of 1945, over one million anticommunist White Russian soldiers and 50,000 Cossacks, who had fought on the German side, surrendered to the Western Allies in what is today northeastern Austria. Along with their families, they were turned back and handed over to the fast-approaching Soviet commissars. No need to describe their fate.

Dr. Tom Sunic (www.tomsunic.com) is a former professor, author and a board member of The American Third Position Party http://american3rdposition.com/.