A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  If you don’t mind my getting a bit ahead of myself, Captain Morehouse later became our Political Officer for the South Sound Brigade of the NVA, which meant that the Party trusted him with what amounted to our spiritual welfare. The PO was the guy who took the political and military policy that came down from the Political Bureau and the Army Council, interpreted it for us and explained to us, if ever we had any questions, just why we were doing what we were doing at any given time. Which meant he had to understand it himself, so sometimes he had to move very light on his dialectic feet and be able to read the tea leaves. The PO had a veto on any operation a crew might be considering, if he felt the proposed tickle was in some way against Party policy or counterproductive to the war goals. He always outranked the actual unit commander in case it ever became necessary for him to pull rank, but with good political officers and good field commanders that didn’t happen, and we had a pretty good crop of both in Lewis County. Red and Tank Thompson always got along well, which was a good thing. I know some outfits had problems with personality conflicts and political rivalries between the CO and the PO.

  Morehouse very seldom talked about himself at all. He was a single father with a small son and daughter who were the only other things in his life besides the Northwest movement. His wife was never mentioned, and it was some time before I learned that she had become a drug addict back in Houston and run off with her Vietnamese pusher, who put her to peddling her ass on the street in exchange for crack. Then one day she actually took Red to court in Dundee to try and get custody of the children on the grounds that he was an evil racist. She really wanted to sell them to It Takes A Village for a cut of the adoption bond. That kind of thing happened a lot. The way I found out what was going on was that Red asked me to come along the night some of the boys went and had a quiet word of prayer with the wife’s attorney, which I was proud and honored to do. That was the first full-fledged NVA tickle I ever went on, and this was even before there was an NVA, before 10/22 when we were supposed to stay legal, or at least be discreet. The hell of it was, Red’s ex still almost got custody even when her lawyer never showed up in court, and she might have gotten custody if she herself hadn’t been stoned on coke and she hadn’t vomited on the judge in chambers. Then she kicked a bailiff.

  The attorney? Still at the bottom of the Puget Sound off Budd’s Point somewhere, so far as I know. Yes, ma’am, I guess come to think of it, that was the first time I participated in killing a man, but lawyers don’t count.

  Red didn’t mind getting personal when it came to making a political or racial point, though. One cold nasty winter’s day I asked him how he’d felt about leaving the warm place he was born to come to this rat’s nest (as I thought of it then) up here in the Northwest. “Shane, I was born and raised in the Texas hill country, in a town originally settled by German immigrants called New Braunfels,” he told me. “I grew up not just with ten gallon hats and cowboy boots but sausage and sauerkraut and Saturday nights in the Hofbrau beer garden. If I had my way I would have lived out my life in Texas and died there, and if I’d ever gone anywhere else it would have been to Germany, although the only Germany I’d want to live in hasn’t existed for a long time. Leaving that place where four generations of my ancestors lie buried, and knowing that I wouldn’t be coming back, was one of the hardest things I ever had to do in my life. But it’s by no means the first time our race has done such a thing, starting thousands of years ago when the first Goth packed up his wife and his kids and his dogs into an ox cart and headed over the hill. All those forefathers of mine buried in New Braunfels came from somewhere else. Long ago I recognized that I was born into one of those times when my life was not mine to live as I pleased. With any luck my grandchildren might have that luxury. We don’t, not in this generation. God not only gave us life, He made us white. He did that for a reason, and it wasn’t so we can just run off into the woods and fields and dance and sing and rollerblade and get stoned and have fun. Life is duty. You were born here in this wonderful land, and I envy you. I had to come here by conscious decision, and it was a long hard road. But it was the right decision for me, and I will never regret it.”

  Red was the first guy who was able to sit down and talk to me about the Jews. For the Wingfields it was simple: Jews were creatures of Satan and that was that. Before I met Red I knew only what I had read in books or seen on TV about the Third Reich. I could read between the lines, I remembered what Mandelbaum had tried to do to me, and I knew that I didn’t like the hose-nosed bastards because they were against Adolf Hitler and Adolf Hitler was my main man, but frankly I would have had a very difficult time justifying any of it with logic or facts. Not that it bothered me. Sometimes what’s right isn’t susceptible to logic. You just know it in your soul.

  I remember asking Red once whether or not we really had a chance to win this thing, in view of the terrible odds stacked against us. “Actually, I think we’ve got a better chance now that we’ve ever had since 1945,” Red told me with assurance. “You see, Shane, history proves one thing, time and again. The Jew will always overreach himself. No matter how smart and subtle and patient and organized they may be, eventually Jews always push their host peoples too far and then it’s pogrom time again. Always. They are nowhere near as smart as they think they are. Clever yes, but theirs is not a creative intelligence. They can beg, borrow, steal and adapt almost anything in their host cultures for their own purposes, but they’ve never really invented anything. They didn’t even invent monotheism; the Pharaoh Akhenaton beat them to that and the authors of the Bible even cribbed a lot of the Psalms and Proverbs from Egyptian hymns to the sun. Jews will achieve effective control of a society through years, sometimes centuries of incredibly patient plotting and planning and skulduggery, but once they do, they are never content to keep on exercising that control quietly and from behind the scenes. The funny little man with the big nose can never quite bring himself to stay behind the curtain permanently. Instead, in his moment of triumph Yehudi always lets the mask slip and lets the world see the arrogance and Talmudic hatred and hubris beneath it. Winston Churchill, of all people, once made a very revealing comment about the Jews. He said the Jew was always either at your feet or at your throat. Interesting, eh? It shows that he knew exactly who he was betraying his people and his country to, the brandy-soaked son of a bitch.”

  I had read Mein Kampf, or tried to, when I was about ten, before it had been pulled off the library shelves, but I had understood very little of it. I mentioned this to Red and he said, “Hmm, yes, MK is a kind of tough sledding for a ten year-old, especially if you get hold of a bad translation. Let’s start you out on the short catechism, so to speak.” The next time we met in the Wingfields’ classroom Red handed me one of his illegal copies of Commander Rockwell’s White Power, which by then was banned from distribution under the Dees Act through the infamous civil liability clause.

  In one of their many end runs around the First Amendment, the Federal courts had really gone to town on the old dodge of using the civil law to punish people for things that weren’t technically criminal and were even supposed to be constitutional rights, like thinking forbidden thoughts and reading forbidden literature. The tyrants in the black robes ruled that books on the Attorney General’s list were controlled material like guns or drugs because of their unspecified potential to “do harm” and were therefore subject to registration and licensing. You had to be over twenty-one, and then you could possess one copy only of certain books in your private collection if you could grandfather them and show you possessed them prior to the passage of the law, which of course meant registering your books with the government within a set period of time and thus identifying yourself as a dissident. But you could not post books which were on the Attorney General’s Index of Controlled Literary Properties to the internet or give such books to anyone else, without possible (read damned near certain if you got caught) civil liability for a “human rights violation,” and “inflicting mental anguish.
” Meaning that any non-white or bugger boy who found out you gave something politically incorrect to someone else could file a civil lawsuit for violating his rights, even though you gave the book to a completely unrelated third party and the plaintiff never read a word of it or even saw the book in the third party’s possession. Hearsay was enough for a million-dollar civil lawsuit that would gobble up every penny you owned in legal fees and destroy your life before it was dismissed three years down the road on a technicality, i.e. more damned lawyers draining everybody like leeches. Technically speaking, my parents could have sued Morehouse and stripped him to his underwear, because I was underage and he was poisoning my youthful mind with all that hate. I very carefully concealed my new unorthodox reading habits from my mom.

  White Power simply blew me away. I read it in a single weekend and I was back for more on Monday. Red loaded me up with all kinds of wonderful hate. There were short hors d’oeuvres like Britton’s

  Behind Communism, Grimstad’s Anti-Zion, Harwood’s Did Six Million Really Die?, The Talmud Unmasked, Hoffman’s Judaism’s Strange Gods, and of course Sergei Nilius’s translation of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which under the Dees Act was in a category all its own. You couldn’t even own a single legally grandfathered copy of the Protocols, and after 10/22 possession got you ten years’ Federal time instead of the usual nickel. Our Party copies were printed off an internet server in Singapore that would publish anything if the money was right. At one point ZOG actually sent a Green Beret commando team into Singapore to destroy that server. Next out of Red Morehouse’s illicit cache of quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore came the longer, heavier tomes: Yockey’s Imperium, Simpson’s Which Way Western Man?, Codreanu’s For My Legionaries, Arthur Butz’s Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Commander Rockwell’s This Time The World, and the banned history books of David Irving. Finally, in my junior year in high school, I felt ready to tackle Mein Kampf again. And this time, I finally understood what the Führer had been saying to me all those years ago.

  All these books were part of an underground reading course put together by the Party that taught so many of my generation what was what. Red’s little private lending library contained several copies each of these and other works, and the only time he ever got even slightly aggravated with any of his Chowder Society kids was when they wouldn’t return borrowed books. There was always a waiting list for everything. I was given one book at a time and strictly cautioned against showing it to anyone else, because the open possession of racial literature was starting to get much more dangerous than even civil lawsuits. We had to worry about informers to the Human Rights Hotline, brainwashed or just vicious nasty kids of all races, little damned sneaks who were told in diversity class what particularly evil titles to look for in their friends’ homes and lockers and bedrooms. In addition, the books themselves were becoming harder and harder to obtain. There were still some old pre-Dees Act copies from various semi-legitimate publishers, and there was more than one crude underground hand-press in the Party that could print and bind books in small numbers, but in many cases we had to make do with samisdat photocopies in binders disguised as computer manuals or college crib notes or whatever. The loss of a book was a hit to our unit in and of itself, but it also drew heat from the authorities. The U.S. Marshalls’ office were responsible for enforcing Federal court orders, and they were always trying to trace any copies of just about every racial book on our covert list and seize them under various injunctions and judgments from the malicious civil lawsuits the Jews and their allies were always filing against white people. When copies of banned books were found, they were burned. If a number of copies were seized in what the media called a hate cache, they were burned in a big bonfire in front of the television cameras. People found in possession of multiple copies of books on the Index with intent to distribute received crushing prison sentences for contempt of court, with maximum publicity, so all us white boys would know to keep our minds squeaky clean and don’t go reading things we hadn’t oughta.

  At the same time we were reading these banned books surreptitiously under the bedcovers at night with a flashlight, literally so sometimes in my case, we were reading and discussing perfectly legal but unauthorized books in our perfectly legal but highly unauthorized and suspect little seminars after school. This is a good example of the odd way things sometimes worked back then. Red was always sure to curtail any discussion or even mention of any book on the Index in Chowder class, because that might conceivably render it a “conspiracy.” Within the parameters of what remained of white dissent’s quasi-legal but persecuted status, the Feds could not actually make a criminal case of hatecrime out of our little after-hours circle if we were discussing, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Waltari’s The Dark Angel, or Conan Doyle’s sci-fi and historicals. (I’d thought Doyle stopped with Sherlock Holmes and Sir Nigel Loring, and I will be eternally grateful to Red for introducing me to Professor Challenger and Brigadier Gerard.) Ironically enough, they might have done had we been reading Huckleberry Finn, because of the infamous N word, but since that was actually a pro-nigger book the Chowder Society didn’t waste time on it.

  History was a little more dangerous, but Red had a genius for using texts and sources that were kosher in themselves while imparting valid and heretical knowledge. A good example of this was the couple of weeks we spent analyzing Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror. Since Tuchman was New York Jewish and female, we could hardly be accused of partaking of Dead White European Males, and yet once you disregarded her whining about the poor persecuted Jews of the Crusades, her book was a damned informative analysis of the Middle Ages in almost every respect. You can learn a lot even from officially authorized sources once you have acquired the vital points of reference, the background, the context, the revolutionary awareness of what to ignore. Another good one was Albert Speer’s Inside The Third Reich, which reads very schizoid when you first try it on. But Red went through our four copies and very carefully blacked out about a quarter of the book, removing all the anti-Nazi crap that Speer had been required by West German law to put in, in order to have his memoirs published at all. The result looked a little like one of those FBI files you used to get under the Freedom of Information Act with everything important hidden by nasty ugly black bars, but once we got used to reading around the excisions then all of a sudden the book hung together and made sense, and we were able to get an awe-inspiring glimpse of the Reich in all its glory. Which I suspect was what the canny Herr Speer intended all along.

  At one point, one of the Party’s computer geeks in Portland named Wally Haupt scanned Inside the Third Reich onto a word-processing program, deleted all the same anti-NS parts Red had blacked out, and produced our own shortened, de-kosherized version which we then read on diskette or printed out. He was caught by the FBI, arrested on a charge of felony copyright violation, and in the hullabaloo after 10/22 Wally simply disappeared into the Federal GULAG under the Patriot Act. The Republic didn’t find out Wally Haupt was still alive until almost ten years after Longview, and we traded some American sanctions spies for him, but when we finally brought him Home his mind was gone, and I do mean the man’s mind was gone. They’d lobotomized him.

  Red Morehouse had a couple of educational fortés. One was economics and the other was the Middle Ages, which is one reason he didn’t mind using a Jew like Barbara Tuchman as a source if the historical fact was straight up. “A very neglected period in our history,” he told us once in Chowder class. “Political Correctness has never quite figured out a way to twist that part of our past to fit into their world view, and so the academic establishment tends to ignore anything from the fall of the Roman empire up until the Renaissance as much as possible. It’s kind of a historical black hole, except for occasional pieces of PC crap like trying to claim Hildegard Von Bingen was a lesbian, which is completely untrue and which makes me want to strangle somebody. There are some interesting philosophical lessons
from that time for us today, you know. Some years ago I was reading a scholarly volume on the Middle Ages when I came across a translation of a textbook or primer used to teach children of the nobility to read, kind of a fourteenth-century See Dick And Jane kind of thing. The book described all the various people who existed in the medieval world and their functions. The king rules by divine right, the baron gives justice and protection to his people, the knight does deeds of valor for his lady love, the priest intercedes with God for the souls of men, the merchant brings goodies from foreign lands. It continued on down to the tradesmen such as the weavers, the butchers and bakers and so forth, you get the picture. Anyway, at the very end was a single sentence thrown in almost as an afterthought which described people who in those days were at least ninety percent of the entire population. It was a phrase which has stuck in my mind from that day to this: ‘And the peasant toils so that all may eat.’”

  “That’s like white people today,” said John Bell.

  “You got it!” said Red with a smile. “I can’t think of any better way to describe the role of the white man today, and many white women as well, once you exclude the artificial affirmative action-created female managerial class. We are high-class peasants. Our function in this society is simple. The peasant toils so that all may eat. Mexicans may heft and tote, but white men have to tell them what to heft and where to tote it. White men build and drive the trucks that deliver the consumer goods, manufacture and package the junk food, maintain the power plants that keep the air conditioners and televisions running, cut down the trees and make the paper which keeps the bureaucracy going. White police and soldiers loyally carry the guns and pull the triggers for ZOG, in the Middle East and everywhere in the world. Above all, white men pay the overwhelming bulk of the taxes which keep the whole rotten system we live under afloat. We sow, but never do we reap. We are serfs on the great worldwide consumer plantation, producing the wealth and keeping everything going while our multifarious masters sit on the veranda eating and drinking the products of our labor, and spinning their pointless little intrigues. Like all peasants, we have no place in the political process.