In addition to studying the political thought of the European New Right, or New Culture, I have recently begun to study American National Socialist and White Nationalist literature. Unlike a normal liberal scholar, however, I do not study these phenomena with the intention of unthinkingly demonizing them in the terms of the dominant Judeo-Christian morality or multicultural intolerance of difficult truths. Just as I studied political extremists in Roma, I genuinely want to know what, why, and how these people think and act. What purpose beyond politics and a career would it have served me to dismiss the claims, truths, questions, critiques, beliefs, and practices of Roman Fascists in the terms provided by their enemies? I always chafe at suggestions I study fascism by reading what its enemies have to say about it. No one in the American academy would suggest I study Communism by reading the words of Hitler, Nietzsche, or Mussolini. Although now that I think about it, Communists act as authorities on both Fascism and Capitalism, for it was certainly expected that I read Marx and David Harvey in order to understand Capitalism. I suppose this stems from what Kevin MacDonald calls the “culture of critique,” wherein intellectuals are so politicized and imbued with a leftist activist spirit that scholarship and deep understanding count far less than towing the, always anti-Western culture, party line. Non-academics like my father have a hard time understanding that “reactionary,” “chauvinist,” and “racist” are actually useful terms with which to end an academic discussion. Not that people should, or need, be these things; the point is that “reactionary,” for example, is used by academics and scholars to describe ideas, people, and processes that are deemed anti-progressive, without ever stopping to contemplate how what is “progressive” became so, or on whose behalf this “progress” functions. We must be more concerned to know why we know what we know and how knowledge is created.
In that spirit, I have been reading H.A. Covington’s 4 volume “Northwest Trilogy” (even if Brigade is the best of the series, I’m Old School, so I still say trilogy) on the Northwest Volunteer Army, and Kyle Bristow’s White Apocalypse, among a small mountain of others – how horrified so many people would be to know that many of these books exist and that a very few white people are angry enough to kill over what has become of their Civilization. Even in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh brought William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries to the attention of presumably every American, there was already a handful of relatively well-written fictions about white racial consciousness and Western renaissance, Randolph Calverhall’s Serpent’s Walk and Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints being the most read and respected. Mark O’Meara noted in his review of the Covington series that this type of book is most useful to White Nationalism as a way to politicize those who are indisposed to reading political philosophy. Political fiction has a long history in the West and America. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, various works by Richard Wright and James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, all played significant roles in creating and maintaining the Civil Rights Movement and later emergence of black radicalism. With the current set of American white nationalist authors, are we perhaps seeing a new attempt to create and expand a movement based on political fiction? The answer is an unequivocal “Yes,” and Covington and Bristow could be its Wright and Baldwin.
The two are united by a deep love of the white race, its culture, and cultural achievements; a hatred of multiculturalism, racial pluralism, and the celebration of mediocrity that both of these promote; and an awareness of weapons and tactics. They both write books designed to mobilize; they clearly call white men and women to arms in defense of their cultures, civilization, and children’s right to a future. While reading the many “lectures” through which history and philosophy are introduced in White Apocalypse, I kept waiting for the most popular Hitler quote amongst the New Right and literate White Nationalists: “Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live”. The quote is used to great effect by Mark O’Meara in his Covington review and should be the subtitle of the Covington series. It is also an unspoken trope that runs throughout Bristow’s book, because in it we see that the racial, cultural, and political/philosophical enemies of the white race understand that their survival depends on struggle. They organize, inculcate, and protect their own. They demonize and destroy their enemies. It is only the bourgeois whites that fail to understand this fact of existence. Where White Apocalypse is the most interesting is in explaining why this is so.
markdyal 