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Month: June 2012

Categories
Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychology

Laing and Anti-Psychiatry

Or:

The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious
3.- Laing and Anti-Psychiatry
(read in 1983)


Sometimes it is not an entire book what causes a deep impression in one’s values and worldview. Sometimes it is a single chapter; a single phrase.

The overwhelming majority of white nationalists are unaware of the fact that psychiatry is a false science. I mean: psychiatry is as false as, say, the Boasian anthropology that has become axiomatic throughout all anthropology departments in the West.

Before I entered the racialist arena I devoted quite a few years of my life to research this pseudoscience. The result was a massive exposé of psychiatry that benefited the Spanish-speaking people (for example, today I learnt that a blog was started with the title of one of my book chapters exposing the history of psychiatry).

The whys of the toleration of a pseudoscience within the academia and throughout the West have to do with the fact that the basic etiology of mental disorders lies in the abusive modes of parenting. But this truth has become a heresy in a world that only aims to perpetuate the status quo, including those nuclear families run by abusive parents.

When in 1983, standing in a bookstore because I was too poor to purchase the book, I read the interview of psychiatrist Theodore Lidz in Laing and Anti-Psychiatry, I corroborated what I suspected: that some parents are driving their children mad. Lidz’s words that a schizophrenogenic mother simply cannot conceive that her child sees the world with different eyes than her own made a huge impression on me to understand the dynamics in my own family.

More recently I have extensively written on this subject in Spanish, of which I have translated only a fraction to English (e.g., here and here). But all of my writing was possible only thanks to my reading this Lidz interview in a bookstore almost thirty years ago with no soft sofas. Lidz was one of the very very few psychiatrists that dismissed the medical model of mental disorders taken for granted in his own profession and proposed a trauma model instead. Abusive parents are the real and only culprits for the emotional fall of their offspring; blaming the child’s brain or the child’s genes, as his colleagues do, is a political rather that a scientific endeavor.

It is worth saying that when I lived in Houston I phoned Lidz, who was already in his nineties, and he appeared as warm and lucid as if he was in his prime. How different from Ronald Laing, the guru whose last name was chosen for the title of the book’s collection of anti-psychiatric essays. (In his later writing Laing looked like an intellectual snob rather than someone who fully sided the child against the all-out assault perpetrated at home in some extremely dysfunctional families.)

Laing and Anti-Psychiatry was published in 1971. Those who are under the impression that psychiatry has since proven the biomedical basis of mental stress and disorders would do a favor to themselves by reading the much more recent How to Become a  Schizophrenic: The Case Against Biological Psychiatry by John Modrow (whom by the way I used to correspond).

♣

For the other nine books see here.

Categories
American Revolutionary War Americanism Blacks Egalitarianism Liberalism Miscegenation

Brad Griffin on the Yankee question

Below, an abridged version of one of Brad Griffin’s recent articles of the “Amurrica Series: Constructive Solutions” at Occidental Dissent (OD), with some explanatory Wikipedia links added:

To my knowledge, OD is the only racialist site in existence that has defined the problem in painstaking detail (see the many discussions about this in our archives) and consistently hammers away at the only solution to the problem.

  • Is the problem simply that Jews are using the blacks to destroy Whites?

Historically speaking, the coalition between DWLs [Disingenuous White Liberals] and blacks goes back to the prewar abolitionist movement, when Northern reformers like William Lloyd Garrison forged the original alliance with free negroes like Frederick Douglass.

Massachusetts repealed its anti-miscegenation law in 1843. Starting in 1865, Massachusetts began to lead the nation at the state level by passing comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation, or civil rights laws. Blacks were already voters in Massachusetts before the War Between the States.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was vetoed by Andrew Johnson, who was subsequently impeached by Black Republicans in Congress, was the first stab at federal civil rights legislation in American history.

The Civil Rights Act of 1875, which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases in 1883, attempted to accomplish most of what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 sought to do in the twentieth century. The Federal Elections Bill of 1890, which was defeated in the U.S. Senate, was the precursor of the Voting Rights Act.

In the twentieth century, Jewish influence had the effect of exacerbating a preexisting problem: Jews didn’t create the coalition between DWLs and blacks or even set its long term utopian goals of integration and eradicating racial prejudice.

In the late nineteenth century, the Jews came along like Hispanics and Asians would later do after the Immigration Act of 1965. They augmented the leftwing coalition with their wealth and media influence.

Jewish influence was more like, say, a necessary condition of the national triumph of the Left. Just like the rise of the mass media, the GI Bill and higher education, or Allied propaganda in the Second World War.

  • Is the problem the demise of restrictive covenants? Is the problem, say, the entirety of the Civil Rights Movement?

No, restrictive covenants was just one of many “discriminatory barriers” to the advancement of black freedom and equality. The poll tax and the white primary were similarly struck down by the Supreme Court in order to advance Americanism, which is to say, the identification of America (and ultimately the whole world, as it is progressively infected by the disease) with liberalism and democracy.

What was the intention of outlawing restrictive covenants? The intended effect was to advance black freedom. The intended effect of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was to advance black freedom. The intended effect of the Voting Rights Act was to advance black freedom and equality by giving them the right to bloc vote in democratic legislatures.

In the North, restrictive covenants coexisted with a society that had been committed at the state and federal level to the larger project of integration ever since Massachusetts passed the first civil rights law in 1865. Minnesota barred school segregation in 1877. Michigan banned public accommodations segregation in 1885. New York banned public school segregation in 1894.

The demise of restrictive covenants was just the fall of one more domino at the hands of the same constituency of liberal utopian reformers (like the progression of cancer, spreading throughout the body) that had already succeeded in abolishing slavery and repealing anti-miscegenation laws and banning every other form of segregation.

The move into prohibiting “housing discrimination” was natural and consistent with a society already on a trajectory toward supporting affirmative action and banning “disparate impact.” Just like the abolition of slavery, it was one more reform that was consciously implemented to advance the positive ideal of black freedom and equality.

BradThe bottom line here is that there is a constituency in America with a peculiar vision of “Americanism,” which they define as the never-ending ideological expansion of liberty, equality, and democracy, and the eradication of all barriers to these holy utopian ideals (racial, cultural, religious), whether foreign (Nazi Germany) or domestic (Confederacy), which has been driving America’s racial and culture decline ever since the abolitionist movement began in the 1830s, if not since the American Revolution began in the 1770s.

Who is this foe?

There is a long historical arc of racial and cultural decline that stretches from 1776 to 2012. It leapfrogs from one utopian reform to another without missing a beat: revolution to abolition to civil rights to women’s suffrage to world peace to feminism to gay marriage. The same people are usually involved in multiple liberal reform causes.

The instinctive goal of the revolutionary spirit is always to chew up and tear down traditions and established hierarchies, to “liberate” everything in its path, to “level” everything it finds, based on the assumption that nihilistic destruction of the existing social order is inherently good.

For some strange reason, each new utopian reform, each new degenerate movement to destroy the existing social order (whether it be revolution, abolition, civil rights, feminism, or fagging the military), is invariably launched into cultural orbit from the Northeast, and imposed on the holdouts in the rest of the country through the centralization of power in the federal government.

The Northeast never actually wins these cultural debates. Instead, it triumphs through imposing its ideal of Americanism on the rest of the country, usually through control of the centralized government in Washington. Then resistance collapses, submission and demoralization sets in, and we “move forward” to whatever beckons as the cutting edge of degeneracy.

OD is the only racialist website which observes this broad historical pattern, recognizes its importance, draws attention to its existence, and recommends disrupting it through the dissolution of the Union.

If an international border was drawn across the Mason-Dixon line, the cycle would accelerate in the rump of the Union, as it once did during the War Between the States and Reconstruction, because the force that is driving the whole process is and always has been based in the Northeast, and the secession of the South would increase its relative power in Washington.

The dissolution of the Union would fatally weaken the influence of “Americanism” worldwide. It would change the whole international order by fatally undermining Washington in its own backyard.

Alternatively, the preservation of the Union will exacerbate the problem by flooding the recalcitrant areas in the South and West with non-White immigrants dependent on the welfare state, who will politically align themselves with the cultural arsonists in the Northeast, thereby weakening the already diminished and retreating forces of conservatism in the United States.

Dissolving the Union and repudiating Americanism along with its demographic base is the only way to put an end to these never-ending cycles of liberal reform. Nothing else will suffice to arrest and reverse our decline.

Disunion is the solution.

Categories
Autobiography Bible God Jesus New Testament Old Testament Pseudoscience

The cult that I left

Mrs Eddy

Mary Baker Eddy

This piece was chosen for my collection of the 2014 edition of Day of Wrath, and I discarded it for the 2017 edition of the same book. However, it can still be read as a PDF: pages that I stole from the now unavailable edition of Day of Wrath:

https://westsdarkesthour.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/eschatology.pdf

Categories
Feminism Homosexuality Sexual "liberation"

The fate of the white race—in the hands of the empty-headed sex

It is important to notice that the great increase in homosexuality that we see nowadays, and also the increase in prestige for that form of behavior, is due in no small measure to the existence of scientific means of birth control. This development was a watershed event in evolutionary terms, decoupling sex from the natural, reproductive function it had served ever since life began on earth and making it into something that is now widely viewed as only a lifestyle statement. By their nature, scientific birth control technologies create a large pool of people of both sexes who don’t have children and who won’t have them, either by choice or simply because they are not able to conform to cultural norms. Such people have no stake in the future, and live only for themselves. The existence of this element acts like a corrosive acid on the structure of a society, eating away cultural bonds and decomposing it into individual atoms.

Once the pleasures of sex have been in this way decoupled from reproduction, the inevitable result is equality—between the sexes, because now women can have sex with the same abandon that was previously only the birthright of men, and between heterosexual and homosexual, because heterosexual sex need not necessarily lead to reproductive consequences either. It all becomes just undifferentiated pleasure, a lifestyle choice. This has the effect of raising the prestige of homosexuality, which had heretofore been held in contempt since ancient times, to put it on a par with heterosexuality.

Before the advent of such technologies, women had very little say in whether they were going to have children or not. The biological attractions of the reproductive act are such that virtually all fertile women ended up having them. But now, in what must certainly be a supremely dysgenic move, the genetic fate of the White race has been placed into the hands of the empty-headed, weak-willed, easily-brainwashed sex. As a result, the most intelligent White women often defer having children until it is too late. Even the White women who do have White children often end up choosing to have the children of the more feminine, brainwashed, politically-correct males available to them, because such males fit in better with our politically-correct culture and are therefore more likely to have stable social networks and employment. Some of them—too many of them, no doubt—have even aborted White children and chosen to have trendy niglets instead.

All in all, it’s hard to overstate what a disaster scientific birth control techniques have been to the White race.


Posted by Der weiße Engel
on December 2010, discussed again at TOO today

Categories
Beauty Videos

The Banishment of Beauty

by Kevin Alfred Strom

Here is an amazing four-part video series (43 minutes total and well worth the time) by the painter Scott Burdick. Don’t be put off by the fact that Burdick goes out of his way—way, way out of his way—to show traditional Western art, some of it his own, that depicts non-Whites. It’s as if he’s saying “see how non-racist I am,” to deflect attention from the fact the rising Art Underground he depicts is substantially Whiter than rural New Hampshire. He nevertheless masterfully skewers the modern art establishment and their hatred for beauty—and their literal banishment of it from their galleries, museums, and literature. With calm logic he analyzes the common characteristics of the paintings that are sought out by these culture-distorters, and those that they reject.

It isn’t abstract versus representational art—it isn’t nudity, or the human form or its absence—it isn’t fine-grained versus rough materials; none of these determine what is accepted and what is rejected. In the “intellectual” theories (with Jewish / Frankfurt School roots, though Burdick doesn’t say so) that must be internalized by anyone wishing to rise in the modern art world today, it is beauty itself that must be rejected and ugliness or nothingness which must be praised, especially if the artist pays obeisance to the “intellectuals” and their “theories.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGX0_0VL06U&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIVaTCRyblM&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMA1rn7q7t0&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=byRaMfoiJP4

Categories
Currency crash Peter Schiff Videos

Washington’s

Keynesian trap

Peter-Schiff

See conference: here.

Categories
Abortion Homosexuality

On “West-Coast White Nationalism”

Further to my concerns expressed in my previous post on “the approval of homosexuality in our Western societies and also in our White advocacy communities.”

In Greg Johnson’s latest piece, “Frequently Asked Questions, Part 2”, you can read:

West-Coast White Nationalism is my term for the blending of white racial consciousness with liberal or Left-wing positions on such issues as capitalism, environmentalism, zoning, abortion, drug legalization, homosexuality, and religious pluralism. [my bold type]…

…now I am a member of the Racially-Conscious Left.

Obviously, Johnson won’t reply to the concerns about promoting homosexuality like those expressed recently by Carolyn Yeager, or what I have already said in this blog about “West-Coast White Nationalism,” which merits copying and pasting here:

♣

In the last entry [of my excerpts of the Civilisation TV series] both Kenneth Clark and I discussed Francis of Assisi: a saint who in Spanish language we call San Francisco. Colonists from Spain, who established a fort at the Golden Gate, named the Californian city after St Francis in 1776. Like London and New York, the modern city of San Francisco is a good paradigm to illustrate my interpretation of the Renaissance painting Tempesta [discussed in the above-linked series].

It should be a no brainer—and I am astounded that recently my frankness caused much offence to a well-known nationalist who lives in the Sin City [Johnson]—that white people of sound mind find it rather awkward to reproduce in such a town. I will repeat here my diatribes already written in the threads even if, by doing it, I completely part ways from the candid gentleness of the hero of this series, Kenneth Clark.

In the 1980s I lived in the Bay Area and noticed the cultural gulf between the inhabitants of the city of San Francisco and the family-oriented town of Novato in Marin County at the other side of the Golden Gate, where I lived. I felt the difference between the Sin City and Novato as conspicuous as the two sides of the border with my native Mexico. No hyperbole: that’s what I felt.

How could millions of healthy white families possibly thrive in Sodom, or in Gomorrah? The mere sight of the pink and blue sodomites inhibits altogether our wish to have lots of kids. The visual experience of constantly watching on the streets such rape—that is the exact word—of the beautiful San Francisco of yore inhibits the Aryan soul from founding large families. This is exactly the same psychological phenomenon of watching swarms of Mexican browns and even yellows throughout California.

A few months ago I rewatched Hitchcock’s Vertigo after decades of not seeing it. The movie made me feel extremely dismayed, and my hatred skyrocketed toward the cultural rapists that turned such a beautiful city into Gomorrah. It doesn’t matter that, as an ultraliberal German blogger told me, “these gay demonstrations are neither frequent nor ubiquitous.” The general rape, not only by homos, of the old city is so ubiquitous that, if I had real political power, I’d send the cultural rapists straight to my trains with a one-way ticket you know where.

One of the reasons why I believe that American-style “white nationalism” is phony is precisely because the whole movement is, at least partially, dissociated. With the exception of Harold Covington the movement smells to ink, not gunpowder. Shouldn’t it be more than obvious that, for a nationalist of truly sound mind, the Gomorrahites that brought toddlers to a Sadomasochist Fair in San Fran would have to wear Rosa Winkel camp badges, and subsequently sent to Auschwitz II?

The only way that my passion would be misallocated is that the aggressiveness of the “gay movement” in San Francisco be perfectly compatible with Norman Rockwell’s America. But truly honest nation-builder nationalists know all too well in their hearts that pink and blue wild men are inconceivable in the Rockwell world, don’t you?

Categories
Civil war Eschatology

Insightful comment

When cleaning my spam filter, yesterday I found an insightful comment that inexplicably got stuck in the filter for some days along with the spam. I just corrected some typos:


I think you’re too hard on White Nationalists, or more aptly the visible portion in the blogs and YouTube-like places like Amren and Alt-Right. They, quite sadly of course, have their appearances to keep up. They’ll quickly get swamped defending every single semi-violent insinuation they make if they decided to speak realistically about the real tasks that lay before us. Such integrity would only entail a constant and costly defense against a bombarding media gleeful that they actually have some evil-whiteys to show the world.

Are they irrelevant in terms of American collapse? Yes, Jared Taylor won’t arise from the ashes of America as the next leader of a White Nation. It will be more a man of violent determination and clear, non-conciliatory ideology.

Stormfront is more a money-racket than anything. Alt-Right and Counter-Currents are just a haven for poetic Nietzschean wannabes. But they have their uses, and they’re better than nothing. It brings a few people hope that they know others are out and do not follow the modern spiritual line. I started out in SBPDL.com before I realized that Paul Kersey’s anti-niggerdom means nothing with his zero-tolerance for anything relating to the Jewish question. Few of us were born White Nationalists, and I imagine most are like myself in which the truth is slowly peeled layers instead of jumping into the heart of White racial conscious.

Thus I see little in your consistent act of pointing out dissident-righters as effeminate men who won’t lead the white-militias in the collapse. Of course they aren’t: they’re fucking intellectuals. Everything is still in the coffee-shop intellectual stage for us, and all our possible leaders and greatest fighters are either seething in the military, disenfranchised veterans, in prison, out on societies’ outskirts or merely pretending to accept the society itself.

I’m not as hopeful as yourself in terms of a total economic collapse. I’m afraid its going to be slower, and much more despotic than we would like to imagine. Most economic hard times are followed by the increase in government control, not a decrease. I’m afraid we need to prepare ourselves for even greater multikult sludge to wallow through before we get our rising phoenix moment in America. Our back-to-square-one moment is farther than we’d like to imagine.

There are vastly more militant White Nationalists in America that don’t even know their WNs yet than their are openly militant or even just passively open White Nationalists. Racialism is alive in many white men, but it is a random conglomeration of anti-nigger attitudes with the occasional stereotypical swipes at selected minorities or Jews. They are mostly misguided and disillusioned: easily swayed by Ron Paul types and Rush Limbaugh non-issue crockery than formulating any conception on the current course of White Racial extinction. What gives me hope is that when the hard times come these men will implicitly form along racial lines in the defense of what they think is right, while our enemies explicitly form their racial armies. If they start shooting at the armed gangs of blacks for reasons of a White Nation or for merely reasons of defending their home and family matters little—at that point the fabricated dream of modern American post-racialism will fail and all White men, both coward and patriot alike, will be forced to fight for the White Nation by default.

It’s all Weimar at this point. Getting the word out now, however useless it may seem without the violence to back it, may at least increase the chance that the next White strongman to take control will have proper views that will insure the continuation of the White race. More importantly, we need Alt-Right and Counter-Currents to remind us who the white traitors were. In the anarchy of the post-collapse, and in the simple racial battles that ensue I’m afraid [we] will too quickly forget the White liberals, who will suddenly go quiet and then secretly hide amongst us for our protection.

They deserve to be culled more than any black alive, and that must be tantamount if we ever plan on ensuring the multikult never arises again.

Categories
Homosexuality

At last…!

At last someone spoke out about a problem that most nationalists are reluctant to discuss. This image is taken from Carolyn Yeager’s radio podcast, where she “discusses the increasing promotion and approval of homosexuality in our Western societies, and also in our White advocacy communities.”

OK, Carolyn probably saw the photo that a Spanish policeman of the little town of Bélmez de la Moraleda in Andalusia took me long time ago and momentarily thought that I was, ehem, “gay” (I really hate this word). What can I say? Not all men who have looked a little androgynous in younger years necessarily are.

Anyway, don’t miss Carolyn’s podcast. It’s must listening (link above). As far as I know, it is the first time that the problems of accepting overt, non-closet homosexuality in our community are approached honestly and fairly in audio form.

Categories
Psychology

The character of Harold Covington

From the desk of Covington:



In May of 2010 I received an e-mail from someone asking me the question “Harold, why does everybody talk bad about you on the internet?” I restrained my first instinct to ask him to define the term “everybody” and responded. His questions are [indented]:

That said, it has to be asked, where does all this anti-Covington hatred come from? I know no one else who inspires this kind of reaction.

—Gregory H.

Lordy, lordy, where to begin, where to begin?

I just got back from an organizing road trip into Idaho and so I am catching up with all kinds of backed-up e-mails, a news commentary column, several blogs, and other stuff, so right now I don’t have time to sit down and tap out a long Philippic on this topic. I will give you the simplest and briefest answer(s) that I can.

First off, I am sure it is no news to you that our movement has a lot of people associated with it who have no business within a hundred miles of any kind of alternative politics. We have serious character issues, and since they are largely what is preventing us from mounting an effective resistance to the crisis in our civilization, I refuse to be polite and look the other way. I say out loud what has to be said. I hold up mirrors, and a lot of people don’t like what they see.

Secondly, as the late Dr. Pierce once put it to me in the last civil letter he ever addressed to me, “The problem is, Harold, that we are all chasing the same buck.” Bluntly put, a lot of the anti-Covington mess originates either directly or indirectly from certain Fearless Leaders who don’t appreciate even my limited competition for that same buck. I think a little research will reveal that a large part of the somewhat misnamed Movement in-fighting over the past 50 years between all manner of personalities and groups on the right has its roots in competition for the donation dollar.

Third, a lot of these people who are doing this are simply insane. The internet has allowed too many people to get in touch with their Inner Nut, and when some of us sit down behind the computer keyboard we get a visit from Mr. Hyde. I know because I am susceptible to this myself, and I concede there have been times when I have let the badger loose to howl at the moon, if you will pardon my mixed metaphors, so I know whereof I speak.

Finally, as self-absorbed and conspiracy-theoretical as this sounds, in the case of one major Goat Dancer, I genuinely believe this man to be wearing more than one hat and to be acting on an ulterior agenda. I don’t know for certain. He may be just a kook, but if he is, he has demonstrated a remarkably consistent, persistent, and determined pattern of destructive behavior over the past 23 years for a mere loon. Remember, just because you’re paranoid, that don’t mean they ain’t out to get you. Paranoids have enemies too.

Is there any specific allegation, accusation, or incident I can clarify for you?

—HAC

[Follow-up e-mail]:

The big claim that is made is that you defamed a lot of people within the movement.

—Gregory H.

If by “defamed” you mean that over the years I have publicly discussed people, issues, and events which certain Fearless Leaders desperately did not want discussed in public, then guilty, m’lud. I also have a hideous habit of being right. For instance, I was shouting out a warning on Kevin Alfred Strom as early as the year 2000, when I saw his web site with the pictures of little girls and beefcake photos of himself posing in his underwear on it.

Specifically, that allegedly you wrote this history of the white nationalist movement that contained a great deal of scurrilous material about all sorts of people within the movement including William Pierce, Ben Klassen, and Will Williams.

The document you refer to is a roughly 30,000 word monograph or pamphlet entitled A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement. Actually, Will Williams isn’t mentioned in it at all, which is probably why he’s so pissed off about it.

In point of fact, no, I did not write the Brief History. At least not all of it, and not for that specific purpose. What happened is that somebody came along and plagiarized, collected, and collated a number of articles and bits and pieces from the past 50 years on Movement internal matters and melded them all together into a single report or long article. Some of that “borrowed” material is mine, yes, such as the bulk of the section on Glenn Miller and a good bit of the material on Benny Klassen.

But the Brief History also contains sections which were either written or paraphrased from works by Bill White, Louis Beam, the late Rick Cooper, Dr. Edward Fields, the late David McCalden, “Maguire” and a number of other writers and commentators.

However, I will say this: whoever wrote the Brief History, they know their beeswax. While to be sure some of it is opinion and editorializing, I have been able to find only one single factual inaccuracy anywhere in the report, the allusion to the “late” Bradley Smith, who is still alive. I think that’s another thing that’s driving the Goat Dancers nuts—they can’t refute anything in the report factually, so they scream “HAC wrote it! HAC wrote it!” which they presume must automatically discredit the document.

The hell of it is, the Brief History is not in fact all that pro-HAC or pro-Northwest. The author makes clear that he is not a supporter of the Northwest Migration and that he thinks I’m foolishly wasting my time.

I know none of the people involved and have no way to tell who is right and who is wrong. The temptation is therefore to just say, “everyone involved with this movement is insane and incapable of getting along with each other. We should read everyone’s ideas, but have nothing to do with these people on a personal level or we’ll get sucked into all this too.”

Which may be one reason for all the sound and fury.

You have to bear in mind that most of these specific teapot tempests are decades old, shit going back to the late 1970s in some cases. I have often wondered why none of it ever seems to die down, why someone always seems to go to great effort stirring it up again every couple of years.

One person who I gave the books to some time ago has actually taken the gap but told me that under no circumstances did he actually want to get involved with the “official” Northwest Front because he didn’t know who to trust. Again, that may be the hidden agenda here. I’m not worried. This person will eventually come around.

How do we know who to believe?

Look at my work, look at my life, look at the people who are saying these things–none of whom seem to use their real names–look at the world around you, and then wonder why we have gotten nowhere in our efforts to resist. What can I tell you? You’ve read my novels. Everything I have to say is in there.

—HAC

Good points. The last one I have to ask about is probably the most painful — your brother. Why do you think he turned on you the way he did?

Hopefully after this we can talk about more productive matters. —Gregory H.

No, I have no problem at all discussing Benjie, since he took the first step and went public with his bizarre interview. He chose to do what he did, and now I have no choice but to deal with it.

Prior to that I had been active in the Movement since 1972. During that period of almost four decades, never once did I bring any member of my family into anything I did politically, nor did I ever make any public reference to any family matters other than an internet attempt around 2004 and 2005 to communicate with my children in Ireland, using a blog because I had no e-mail addresses for them. Nor did my father, for all his many faults, ever publicly attack or denounce or embarrass me. Benjie was the one who first violated this ironclad family prohibition. Not surprisingly, he lacks our father’s strength of will and self-discipline in such matters. He’s not the man our father was. (But then neither am I, thank God.)

I first need to give you a little family history. Like many dysfunctional families, we Covingtons are also a highly creative lot, each in our own way. Our father was a talented musical performer of traditional American folk music, who during the folk craze of the 1960s used to open on the North Carolina coffee house circuit for big names like Joan Baez, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger. He had his own musical TV show on TV in Greensboro for a while. He was also a writer of paperback Westerns of the kind that were popular in the 1950s and he once came close to getting a Hollywood screenwriting gig, which would have changed a hell of a lot of my personal history if I’d been dragged to Tinsel Town at age 8 or so.

My middle brother is a fairly well known B-list composer of symphonic, choral, and other high-brow music. He has a masters degree in musical composition, of all the useless things, but he apparently didn’t actually get his Ph D. from the University of Iowa for some reason I’m not aware of, so technically he’s not Doctor Covington. You can buy his stuff off various music sites on the internet, but since I sell most of my own work on Amazon.com and the like, I’m hardly in a position to sneer.

I’ve listened to some of his music. Not my cup of tea, frankly, but then I rather doubt that my fiction is his cup of tea. At least I listened to his compositions on my computer. So far as I know, neither he nor my other brother have ever actually read any of my books. The interview you refer to with Benjie contains comments of his that indicate to me he hasn’t actually read Fire and Rain, the novel he complains about, and so I doubt he’s read anything else.

My daughter in Ireland is an extremely talented up-and-coming young artist in Dublin, and I will say no more about her for fear of messing up her chances in a very liberal and left-wing milieu. I understand she is recently married; if she was speaking to me I’d be hectoring her demanding grandchildren. My son in Ireland is the rock musician of the family, or was. Don’t know what he’s doing now, delivering pizzas for all I know, but apparently at one time he had a fairly well known rock band in the local Dublin club scene for a while.

Now, regarding my youngest brother, who later went so dark side on me: this is the story I got from our mother. Very few details, because Mama wasn’t supposed to be meeting with me at all in those days and she was very reluctant to discuss most family matters with me, for fear I would contaminate everything with my wicked Nazi mojo or whatever, but basically, the story goes like this:

Benjie was supposed to be the actor in the family. Graduated North Carolina School of the Arts, and faced the usual young actor or theatrical techie’s choice: Broadway or Hollywood? Nowadays there’s a few more choices, Europe or Vancouver or various indie outfits, but in the 70s there were only those two.

For whatever reason, Benjie chose Broadway. He lived in New York for a couple of years, fell flat on his face, and he couldn’t make it. He eventually came crawling back home and went to work for the state, which in conservative North Carolina is what one does with unemployed relations who can’t make it in the private sector.

Okay, so far not an unusual scenario. A lot of young dramatic hotshots who go to New York never make it onto Broadway and end up waiting tables or going back home and selling used cars for Daddy, or teaching freshman high school English. But this was back during the time when I was still having my Fifteen Minutes due to Greensboro and the 1980 Republican primary wherein I received 43% of the vote. My name was well known among the Jewish community, and in an industry such as theater in New York, an industry and a city both run by Jews, a young man from North Carolina with the name of Covington looking for a job was going to have a hard row to hoe.

My mother could never force any sort of admission between her lips that I might, just might have been right about something, anything. The Official Version is that I am supposed to be insane, period, end of story. Oh, and evil with it—but she managed to feed me enough lines to read between (deliberately, I think, so she could convey the truth without actually having to say it) so as to let me know that my brother was in essence blacklisted by the Jews. They conveyed to him in a manner the reverse of subtle that he would never work in their town and to get his redneck ass back down to the tobacco and cotton fields where he belonged. There was also something about a bad car crash Benjie was in on the New Jersey turnpike that allegedly affected his mind, but I didn’t get all that at the time and I don’t remember what that was about.

Anyway, the upshot of it all is, is that Benjie probably blames me for ruining his great acting career. I don’t blame him. Teaching a few high school dramatics classes to niggers and wetbacks at East Wake High School is sure as hell a big comedown when you once started life with Oscars and Tonys on your mind. Maybe you could say I did ruin his chances, although it was completely inadvertent on my part. Or maybe he just didn’t have the chops for it, and he washed out on his own. I have no way of knowing.

You would think that after an experience like that he would blame the people who are really at fault, the Jews and the whole system that subjected him to a political litmus test rather than judging him on his actual talent and character, but I long ago learned that people aren’t very logical in these matters.

And that’s about the size of it. I am really sorry that crap like this has to be dealt with in public instead of truly great and serious ideas and deeds and people, but one of the many problems we have these days is that everything has become so petty.

There is an old saying: “Great minds talk about ideas; average minds talk about events; little minds talk about people.” We have an awful lot of little minds running around these days.

—HAC