Birth of a Nation
2 Sep 2009
Greg Johnson, Occidental Quarterly (Excerpts)

H. A. Covington: The Hill of the Ravens (2003); A Distant Thunder (2004); A Mighty Fortress (2005); The Brigade (2008).
Every time a friend adds another weapon to his arsenal, he says “I hope to God I never have to use this.” But he keeps buying them, because they may come in handy. I say the same thing every time I pick up a Harold Covington novel. But I keep reading them. They may come in handy some day.
The four novels under review, collectively called the Northwest Quartet, tell the story of the creation of a sovereign white nationalist state, the Northwest American Republic, out of the territory of the United States sometime in the second or third decade of the twenty-first century — right around the corner, historically speaking. The NAR comprises the present US states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, plus parts of Northern California, Montana, and Wyoming. These states secede from the United States through a bitter five-year guerrilla war fought by the Northwest Volunteer Army. The NVA is an armed political party. Its ideology owes much to German National Socialism, but its tactics are modeled on the Irish Republican Army and the mafia, as well as Muslim organizations like Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the insurgents who have stymied the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These novels are war stories, and frankly that makes me squeamish. I know that war is an integral part of human history; that it decides the destiny of nations, races, and the world; that it forms a large part of the data of world history and the backdrop of world literature; that one cannot write about men without writing eventually about war. I know that war is an occasion for edifying extremes of human greatness and depravity. I know that one can also derive personal inspiration and useful information from war stories. But I just don’t find representations of hatred and violence particularly enjoyable. And the better the writer, the more seductive such representations become, resulting in a kind of sadistic pornography of violence.
Covington is a very good writer, and these novels are very entertaining. Yet they are not war porn. Covington shows war as horrible. It is mostly like a camping trip that drags on way too long: boring, sleepless, nerve-wracking, dirty, and grindingly uncomfortable and inconvenient. But occasionally it is livened up by moments of exhilaration and sheer terror. It is just that he thinks the alternative to war is even worse, for peace with the present system means the oppression, degradation, and eventual extinction of our race. Beyond that, these novels are not meant to be mere entertainment. They are meant to be self-fulfilling prophecies. The author wishes to inspire the creation of a real Northwest American Republic, and his novels are filled with a great deal of sound practical advice about how to do it.