Contextualizing the Motifs of Blood Memory

Based on the theory proposed in Chapters Two and Three and the novels explored at the beginning of this chapter, blood memory is an integral part of the ideology of white nationalism and is the main trope through which the authors of the novels have expressed their beliefs in the differences between the races. This idea has its basis in the 19^th century theory about the ‘heart’

of one’s ‘spirit’ and, from a more modern perspective, from German Ariosophists and the ways in which they felt that one’s blood contained one’s spirit, which was different from one’s soul.¹⁴⁷ Moreover, sayings such as “in the blood” or “to get something honest” reflect the idea that some features of character are inbred, white nationalists who adhere to this ideology may be seen as adhering to an outmoded ideology or belief about how humans are. Furthermore, this idea is intertwined with the other two ideologies, redemption and revolution. Combined together, these leitmotifs provide a complete ideology and new vision for American whites. Blood memory, as proposed by the authors is a part of every white person, whether they know it or not.

The interesting thing that was uncovered in Chapter Four is the fact that no scholar has attempted to connect these aspects before. In Native American and African American cultures, blood memory is an accepted part of the community’s spirit, especially among various Native American tribes, therefore, the idea that genetic memory is somehow interwoven into an individual’s being without them knowing about it and without being in touch with that memory proves lie to the idea that the races are equal. If genetic memory is only part of Native American and African American cultures, then two possibilities emerge—(a) the reason that it is present in these cultures is because of their history of being oppressed, genocide, and enslavement by whites (it must be kept in mind that whites both in North and South America enslaved the indigenous population before importing African slaves), or, which would mean that in this sense, the races are not equal because according to current politically correct ideology, only whites have been and currently are oppressors, or (b) blood memory is present in everyone, which would also give lie to the proposition that all cultures are inherently equal, as not all cultures have had the same experiences.¹⁴⁸ Indeed, it is the idea that all races have different experiences, histories, etc.,

147 For more on this idea, see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1992). The idea of something being ‘in the blood’ is present in Southern American English with the terms ‘get it honest’ and ‘in my/your/his/hers blood.’ On the other hand, the terms ‘get it honest’ and ‘the apple doesn’t fall from the tree’ also represent inheriting certain characteristics from one’s parents. Helena Blavatsky, among others, have expounded on this idea as well.

148 Other races have practiced slavery including, but not limited to various Asians, Africans themselves, and most importantly, Arabs. Indeed, one of America’s first ‘foreign adventures’ involved attacking the Barbary pirates, who

hence they will all have a different blood memory that buttresses the white nationalist argument that the ideology behind multiculturalism and diversity is a sham—being that this ideology is rooted in “cultural Marxism” and has very little, if anything, to do with American

‘exceptionalism,’ which formed the basis for white supremacy in the 19^th century in the United States which continued to bond quite nicely with American expansionism and isolationism until the advent of World War Two.

Blood memory, at its core, implies that intergenerational trauma or the spirit of the race of a person is inherited from his/her ancestors. The major issue is the cultural manifestations of that memory and how it translates into white nationalist writing. After all, it seems that the West has been suffering some sort of cultural or memory trauma from the events of the First World War, where the countries of Europe bled themselves white on the battlefields of France, Flanders and in the East. Could it not be argued that the West has experienced a form of blood memory in its aversion to appearing racist because of the events of colonialism, World War One and more specifically, World War Two? Admittedly, science has dismissed the idea of genetic memory out of hand, again, because the idea has been allied too closely with racism in the past. However, new research regarding mice and smells might lead to a rethinking of genetic or racial memory.¹⁴⁹ In Jungian psychology, racial or genetic memory is part of the collective unconscious that forms a human’s personality and, by extension, a particular society’s culture.

In the novels under examination in subchapter 4.1, the racial memory of white revolutionaries comes to the fore in situations of extreme stress, such as combat. Indeed, the racial consciousness that runs in one’s blood needs only a spark to return one to the fold of the white race. In certain terms, this theory, along with redemption flow into one another as a character becomes disenchanted, literally, with the current prevailing ideology of multiculturalism, etc. This seems to be the natural state of men, while various novelists have also portrayed women as revolutionaries; white nationalist novels continue to stress the “natural”

preyed on American shipping, not only taking the cargo but selling the sailors into slavery. For more on the Barbary pirates, see Robert Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Frederick C. Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War against the Pirates of North Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). For more on slavery in Africa today, see CNN: ‘Slavery’s Last Stronghold: Mauritania’ at and ‘Modern Slave Trade in Africa’ at The Hope Project, www.hopeproject.net.

149 For more on so-called ‘Lamarckism,’ see Ewen Callaway, “Fearful memories haunt mouse descendants,”

Nature.doi:10.1038/nature2013.14272. See also the Scientific American blog site:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/genetic-memory-how-we-know-things-we-never-learned1/.

state of gender relationships, as mentioned above in the Northwest Volunteer Army’s “Moral and Political Basis for Northwest Independence”.

To more radical novelists, such as H.A. Covington, and Order member David Lane, there is a certain natural state that whites must exist in and if they do not exist in this natural state, psychological problems or psychosis will appear, for instance, the ‘gamer’ boy, the white male who refuses to take on the responsibilities of adult life and “wastes his life in his parents’

basement, fleeing responsibility, until he wakes up one day and realizes that he has wasted his life” (Covington, “Dream,” 18). The natural state, according to these novelists is the man as the breadwinner, and the woman as the “heart” of the home with children. For Lane’s part, his novella KD Rebel envisions a more pagan lifestyle as the natural path for white men and women, one in which both have their place and are happy within that place. For their part, both authors reinforce ‘traditional’ gender relationships, which are the subject of the longest running fantasy series—John Norman’s infamous Gor series, in which the main character is thrust upon an alien world, one in which women are slaves and men are masters. While the various white nationalist novelists analyzed do not go that far in assigning women the subordinate role, they do insist that men and women are different and that that difference goes far beyond biology, to influence their respective roles in society and within the family.

Lane’s KD Rebel explains gender relationships in a certain way. In the novella, the ‘KD’

are the ‘Kindred’—a white racial pagan society on the fringes of American society, located in the mountains of Colorado, and various areas scattered in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest. The novel examines the ways in which the Kindred operate and the kidnapping of three women by two KD rebels, and their adjustment to life in the Kindred. In general, Lane’s novella reinforces the natural ideal of the political and social state for whites, stripped of all ‘unnatural’ civilizing tendencies. The conversation between young KD rebel, Eric, and his captive Dory, regarding rape is telling:

"I guess some young KD have taken their pleasure with race traitor women at times," Eric admitted.

"Undoubtedly Viking raiders left few virgins behind when they raided convents filled with nuns a dozen centuries ago. Taking your pleasure with the conquered enemy's women is as old as the existence of humans. But seasoned KD who see the big picture or who are just naturally deep thinkers are not likely to take a

woman's favors by force. I'm not saying it's wrong. Wotanists don't believe in the Christian 'sex is sin' insanity, so what you call rape is in effect just another act of war. But it brutalizes the men who do it, endangering their instincts to protect and provide for women in general. So under the principal of leading by example, I would never do so. Besides, taking a woman's favors by force is no challenge. Nature made us men bigger, faster and stronger so we could catch you women. But that's not an even playing field. The real challenge is in making you want to do the man/woman thing. At least, that's how I see it."

"You know something I like about you?" she asked, placing a hand over his.

"What's that?"

"I know you are telling the truth. You could have raped me instead of being so gentle.

You had all the power, and I was a captive."

"That's not a snap judgment?" he kidded (Lane 2004, 77).

This short conversation, even though it is about rape reinforces pagan racial ideas regarding relationships between the sexes and illuminates white nationalist ideology regarding the

‘natural,’ in white nationalist ideology, relationship between men and women, which is reinforced by Covington’s writings as quoted above.

In rejecting both modernist and postmodernist ideologies, the more revolutionary authors, like Covington and Lane, seem to be arguing for a return to a more natural, Nordic pagan society.

To refresh the reader’s memory on racial pagan ideas of blood memory, a quote from Mattias Gardell’s Gods of Blood: the Pagan Revival and White Separatism will be reiterated:

Racist pagans tend to biologize spirituality. Somehow, gods and goddesses are encoded in the DNA of the descendants of the ancients. Blood is thought to carry memories of the ancient past, and divinities are believed to be genetically engraved upon or to reverberate from deep down within the abyss of the collective subconscious or “folk soul” of a given ethnic or racial group. […] Mixed blood purportedly mixes up the memories of the ancient past and the engraved divinities of different heathen traditions, resulting in spiritual confusion. Accordingly, each individual needs to find one spiritual home (Gardell 2003, 17).

Accordingly, racist pagans like Lane, a follower of Asatru, believe that the modern society weakens the white man’s natural tendencies and corrupts the white woman’s character. While many social commentators have committed on the problems with falling white male sperm count and Western women’s dissatisfaction with their current lives, white nationalists believe the answer to these problems can be found in a return to a more “natural” way of life, with a husband and wife and children as the basis of society.

The idea of ‘unnatural’ civilizing tendencies can also be seen in the post-World War One era German Freikorps, who rejected the ‘civilizing’ and ‘decadent’ tendencies of the Weimar Republic and fought for the sake of fighting—as witnessed by the embryonic SA (Stormtroopers) of the NSDAP—Nazi Party. Unlike the Reconstruction Klan, whose members were the mostly economic ‘up-n-comers,’ the SA were from the working class; however, the occult wing of the Nazi Party, exemplified by Heinrich Himmler’s SS believed quite strongly in the idea of blood memory. The Nazis’ usage of Nordic runes, which also dovetails with the white nationalist pagan

rejection of Judeo-Christianity, is also reminiscent of one of the strands of American white nationalism’s ideological trends—Nazism. Since the rise of George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, the idea that all whites are part of the same family has become more and more popular. The idea of blood memory is only one part of that ideology. Furthermore, once a white person regains knowledge of their ancient heritage, they will come to realize, so the theory goes, that the current civilization that has been promoted since World War Two, that of materialism, consumerism, “cultural Marxism,” etc. has been an ‘unnatural’ ideology that has caused the white race, a white’s family untold damage. Once the person sees the light or remembers his/her racial spirit—redemption follows.