Revolution

The term “revolution” in white nationalist novels has two meanings; the first is the most obvious, a political overturning of the present order, which is replaced by a white nationalist political and societal order, and the revolution of the white spirit, which was examined in the first subchapter. This subchapter, however, examines the political revolution that is envisioned by the various authors of white nationalist fiction. This revolution is the logical outcome of the ideology of the ‘defeated culture,’ because white nationalist/white separatist ideology envisions a particular view of history in which to put it in laymen’s terms: ‘What goes around, comes around,’ this being a simpler way of saying that history is cyclical, as opposed to the Western liberal concept of history being linear and man progressing to ever higher heights of ‘humanity,’

technological achievement, and artistic prowess.¹⁴² In this sense, a political revolution mirrors Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s theories that were examined in Chapter Two, specifically, subchapter 2.1 regarding the lack of the complete annihilation of an idea or nation.

Depending on the author, the revolution could come from a variety of factors, but in most novels, there is a small cadre of hard-core ‘revolutionary soldiers’ who are fanatically dedicated to the revolution, ignoring all other considerations. This aspect has its roots in the

‘Redeemer/Klan Apologia’ novels of the turn of the 20^th century, Thomas Dixon’s

‘Reconstruction’ trilogy and the two reconstruction novels by Thomas Nelson Page Red Rock and Red Riders being the most prominent, though N. J. Floyd’s Thorns in the Flesh and Jerome Thomas’ Ku Klux Klan No. 40: A Novel also feature this theme. Since the Reconstruction-era KKK is the basis for most white revolutionary movements, it should not be surprising that many

Colonization of the New World (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

142 This particular concept is more akin to Eastern philosophy and the idea of reincarnation. However, and more importantly, it is not related to the Nietzschean concept of eternal return. In Nietzsche’s formulation, eternal return is that the individual wills itself to return and live its live over and over again, with everything experienced by that individual being repeated, from life to death, with nothing changing. In the white nationalist context, the idea of revenge is most evident with no repetition of events, meaning that what “unnatural” ideologies are imposed on the overall white population will eventually lead to a revolt.

white revolutionary authors, or those authors that write about white revolution, should choose to feature their revolutionary organizations based on the hierarchy and organization of the first incarnation of the Klan.¹⁴³

In contemporary novels, meaning those published after The Turner Diaries, particularly in the first two decades of the 2000s, the revolutionary groups, while attached to a larger organization, are normally based on the idea of individual cells that work towards a common goal. For the purposes of this subchapter, several novels will be examined: the aforementioned H. A. Covington novels A Mighty Fortress and Freedom’s Sons, Gregory Kay’s first novel of his neo-Confederate saga The Third Revolution, and Lloyd Lennard’s The Last Confederate Flag, also a neo-Confederate novel. It must be remembered that these novels only provide examples of the various types of revolutionary organizations and the reasons that a character comes to join a white revolutionary organization.

Lloyd Lennard’s 2001 novel, The Last Confederate Flag is one of the most poignant novels under examination. The novel examines the controversy over the flying of the Confederate Battle Flag (also known as the Rebel flag, the Southern Cross, or the Confederate Naval ensign) at the Robert E. Lee statue in the fictional Georgia town of Forest. The town is inundated with “black activists” who are supported by some local black activists who are charging the town council, the police chief and, it seems, every white face in sight with racism.

Supported by outsiders, the black activists in the novel are led by the Black Muslims and their leader, Abdul Karim, is shown in stark contrast to the hero of the novel, Stonewall Bedford, a white World War II veteran, native of the area and a member of the town council. The novel shows some very astute observations as to the differences in thought between neo-Confederates and associated fellow travelers and their opponents regarding history and its place in society, the meaning of freedom and liberty and the choices one makes regarding who or what to believe in.

Finally, the novel begins and ends with a poignant reminder that, as stated by Irish revolutionary and poet Padraic Pearse (Patrick Pearce), “There is only one way to appease a ghost. You must

143 For more on the Reconstruction-era Klan, see Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, paperback edition, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University, 1995) and James Van Eldik, From the Flame of Battle to the Fiery Cross: 3^rd Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Las Cruses, NM: Yucca Tree Press, 2001). Most of the founding members of the Reconstruction Klan served, at one time or another, in the 3^rd Tennessee Vol. Inf. Regt. and it was the regimental organization of this unit that formed the basis for the Klan. It is astounding that few researchers have commented on the fact that the majority of the

Reconstruction Klan was composed of former Confederates, who were, for the most part, ‘up n’ comers’ in their communities and were the most educated men in a given community, hence forming the basis of the myth in the South that the Reconstruction Klan kept law and order in their communities.

do the thing it asks you. The ghosts of a nation sometimes ask very big things; and they must be appeased, whatever the cost” (Kay 2004, v).

While the story revolves around the differences between the two sides, the most interesting and telling parts involve the debate between the two sides and how the supporters of the flag and monument view those symbols of an enduring South. One of the flag supporters, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) reads out a portion of an essay written by Judge Ben Smith Jr. as written in the Confederate Veteran magazine and succinctly points to the heart of the matter as concerns certain symbols of not only Southern but white pride. Hence it is quoted at length:

All over the Southland we are plagued with an epidemic of do-gooder educators and mindless politicians hell-bent on obliterating all reminders of the Southern Confederacy. It is said that they do not wish to offend minority groups and members of the new enlightenment. Ancient symbols and time-honored traditions will be swept away as worthless encumbrances to the new breed of Southerner. Our children are taught to despise these totems of a once proud people. The new-style censorship is considered to be a splendid and humanitarian thing, a giant step on the way to the true brotherhood of man […].

What arrant nonsense. It never occurs to these manipulators that catering to any kind of pressure to invoke the banning of symbols and displays of regional heritage is itself a contemptible form of intolerance.

It cannot be a greater sin to offend other citizens who want to enjoy the privilege of free expression under the First Amendment of our Constitution […]

The political avant-garde of today are the most intolerant breed to appear in modern America.

These mischievous people are after votes and care little for constitutional principles. They are the worthy successors of the radical Republicans of another time (those who swarmed Southward during the reconstruction period to plunder, steal and occupy the seats of power). They have done more to polarize the races in the South than they have done to establish the good feeling that ought to exist between them.

If I am offended by someone who is expressing his ideas and not disobeying the law, that is just too bad, for both black and white, yellow and red, have every right to celebrate their heritage. [...] It is irrelevant that someone is offended by this lawful behavior. This is the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave or so it used to be (Lennard 2000, 196-198).

In four paragraphs, four distinct ideas are presented that illustrate the differences and lack of compromise between the two forces that fight over the Confederate flag and associated symbols of not only the South, but indeed, any display of white pride. First, the idea that “do-gooder”

educators are changing the South for the worst is a complaint that was heard during the first Reconstruction period when Northern (mostly young white female) teachers came South working for the Freedman’s Bureau and would educate white and black together, thus trying to break down racial barriers that had existed for hundreds of years. Second, the shift in culture that has occurred where once venerated symbols, i.e. the Confederate flag are now despised and vilified by children, again, signaling a move not only in the contemporary ethos but in the future culture as well. Third, the painting of the opposition as not following the Constitution is a particular sore point with neo-Confederates, though Lennard’s novel is less revolutionary than

Kay’s novels, the examination of which is forthcoming in this subchapter. Finally, the last two paragraphs hit upon the idea that the South has been involved in a culture war since before the Civil War but in particular during the period of Reconstruction.

For Stonewall Bedford’s part, the moment of truth came when he was attacked by three carloads of American Black Muslims armed with AK-47s. While defending his home from the attackers, his son and wife are both murdered by the assailants and several of the invaders die as well. He is brought before a judge with “a huge proboscis,” a normal reference to a person of Jewish heritage, and is charged with first degree homicide (murder with aforethought). He is convicted of first degree murder of three armed foes, regardless of his defending his home from being invaded. While in prison, on the last page of the novel, he reflects on the possibility of what might have been if the Confederacy would have won at Gettysburg:

I still hear the faint calls of the bugles at Gettysburg; still hear the distant sounds of the roll of the drums, see and feel the explosions of the bursting shells. I’m charging up Cemetery Ridge with the long lines of valiant men in gray, as my Confederate comrades scream, die, and reluctantly fall back. For a moment that day, we reached the high ground. If only we could have held it… if only we had won […] if only […]

(Lennard 2000, 432).

This feeling of loss at a future that ‘could have been’ has been expressed by various white Southern authors, the most poignant of which was William Faulkner in his novel Intruder in the Dust:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin[…] Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago […] (Faulkner 1960 [1949], 125–126).

While this expression of grief and longing might seem jingoistic to some, it is important to remember that within the milieu of American white nationalism and the theory of the defeated culture, these expressions of what might have been are important in that they act as a revitalizing force, one that inevitably leads to revolution.

In Gregory Kay’s neo-Confederate Third Revolution cycle, the revolution begins with a riot over the removal of the Confederate flag on the South Carolina State House grounds where it had flown in front of the Confederate soldier monument. The hero of the cycle, a white Columbia police officer, Frank Gore starts out the novel as a proud, native South Carolinian with

a major Southern pedigree. After he is injured during the riot that followed, in which white supporters of the flag were shot and killed by a black police officer, Gore is taken to the hospital and while there, his grandmother, who had raised him urged him to “tell the truth about what he saw,” as the mass media was trying to spin the riot into a “white supremacist conspiracy.” She gives him her locket, which she never took off and urges him to look inside:

Gingerly, he undid the tiny latch and was confronted with a picture of his grandfather in a dress blue Marine uniform on one side, and a small piece of dirty, disreputable-looking red cloth on the other […].

“What else do you see?”

Frank looked carefully, turning the locket over in his hands, but could see nothing else. “All I see is this cloth trim.”

“That’s not trim. That’s a piece of the company Battle Flag that my own grandfather died carrying at Shiloh, fighting the Yankee invaders. Those stains? That’s his blood, Frankie; his blood, my blood, and your blood.

Frank was numb. As he held the object, he could feel a strange warmth coursing through his body and it felt like unseen eyes were upon him.

“This is my heritage […]”

Granny shook her head. “No Frankie, this is your heritage,” she said, tapping his chest gently over his heart with a bony fingertip. “It’s in here, in the heart and in the blood. Bred in the bone, like the old folks used to say. This,” pointing to the locket, “is just a symbol of it, a reminder, so that we never forget who we are!” (Kay 2004, 21).

While this quote reinforces the idea of blood memory in subchapter 4.1, it also starts Frank Gore onto the road of revolution. As Gore tries to tell the truth about what happened at the riot, he is put on paid leave, threatened with jail and eventually, framed for the murders of several people that he did not commit. He eventually joins white journalist Samantha Norris, who is pursuing the truth herself, after her Jewish station owner assaults her in the parking lot of her employer, a television station. After fleeing to the Confederate Army Provisional (CAP), Gore and Norris join the Southern revolutionaries and when Norris is captured after trying to flee the Federal paramilitary forces sent to apprehend them (mentioned on page 158 of the present work) , she is physically, psychologically, and sexually tortured. After being rescued by the Southern revolutionaries, they recruit several high school journalists to produce a video in which she recounts her ordeal, with Frank Gore concluding:

We are called terrorists because we have fought against the armed forces who have sought to kill us, while those same forces slaughtered civilians who dared demand their rights, and murdered helpless old ladies, like my grandmother, Sarah Gore, and my friend, Mary Wheeler, for no other reason than that they knew too much. Those forces,” he snarled, “those forces beat my wife [Samantha Norris Gore], tied her to a table, and forced electrical probes into her private parts until they very nearly killed her!”[…]

“Until then, like most of you, we had no cause; we fled to the Confederate Army Provisional simply in order to stay alive. It was only after we saw what the Federal Government and its shameless lackeys here in the local administration were capable of doing that we became true believers. Due to their un-Godly persecution, we became revolutionaries, not because we lack patriotism, but because we are patriots. No patriot will allow tyrants and despots to hold sway over their country, for any reason. This

South of ours, this beautiful Dixie Land, has been trodden under the heel of the tyrants in Washington for a century and a half, and that heavy tread has beaten down the Southern man until it’s made us think that’s the way it should be” (Kay 2004, 401-402).

Not only does the above quote repeat various neo-Confederate accusations against the Federal government, namely destroying white Southern culture through forced integration, forced

“levelling” of educational opportunities (Affirmative Action), and the denigration of Southern speech patterns and culture, it also shows how one becomes a revolutionary—the threat of death at the hands of an omnipresent Federal government forces one to fight. In the end, Frank Gore becomes the commander of all the neo-Confederate partisans and eventually succeeds in removing the federal government from all former Confederate territories and reestablishing the Confederate States of America. His journey from policeman to partisan to eventual President of the newly reformed Confederate States of America, and the ethnic cleansing of all non-whites from the territory claimed by the CSA covers much the same ground as the other novels examined in this chapter. However, what makes Frank Gore and his journey unique is that he did not start out as a revolutionary but one who believed in the system, which brings this chapter back full circle to redemption and blood memory, since Kay’s new CSA and Covington’s NAR are both based on the idea of race above all else, thus fulfilling what the authors’ theoretical models, the original United States (meaning the country before 1861) with Covington, and the CSA (the nation from 1861-1865) with Kay, were supposed to be and what the destiny of the United States, according to white nationalist is supposed to fulfill—a racially pure white nation

‘made by and for the white race.’ This idea of the United States as a ‘city upon the hill,’ a beacon of freedom in a world filled with dictatorship and repression can only be realized, in the white nationalist framework, when all races are separated and the ‘great melting pot’ of races is completely broken and each race can fulfill its destiny separately.

The only way that separation can come is through revolution, as expressed in Covington’s Northwest Novels in which revolution comes to the Pacific Northwest in the form of the NVA (Northwest Volunteer Army), an IRA-style white separatist organization dedicated to breaking off the Pacific Northwest from the United States and expelling ‘ZOG’/The ‘Beast’ from the area they have claimed for their racial homeland. The third novel of the series examines the Longview

The only way that separation can come is through revolution, as expressed in Covington’s Northwest Novels in which revolution comes to the Pacific Northwest in the form of the NVA (Northwest Volunteer Army), an IRA-style white separatist organization dedicated to breaking off the Pacific Northwest from the United States and expelling ‘ZOG’/The ‘Beast’ from the area they have claimed for their racial homeland. The third novel of the series examines the Longview